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Google Now TIMEThe technology giant faces the biggest shift since its founding By Victor Luckerson. Google. com had a good run. For years, it was the entryway to the World Wide Web for millions of people every single day. For years, it was the core moneymaker for what has become the most valuable Internet company of all time. And it created a new verb at the same time it destroyed the need to remember all kinds of basic minutiae, like state capitals, website URLs or the definition of the word “minutiae.”Strike that, Google.

But, with more and more of our time online being spent far away from desktop computers, the website’s days as the central focus of its parent company have come to an end. Google wrote the first line of the website’s elegy in a May blog post announcing that mobile searches had surpassed desktop searches in at least ten countries, including the company’s biggest market, the United States.

In the post, Google called the shift a “tremendous opportunity.”In person, Amit Singhal, Google’s senior vice president in charge of all search- related products, acknowledges that the shift also brings unprecedented challenges for the company. Mobile has actually made us very vulnerable in that sense because the future is nowhere close to what we earned on desktop over ten, 1. Mountain View, Calif. We are having to start from scratch again.”While Google. Google is that the way we access information is undergoing its most fundamental shift since we were first introduced to ten blue links in 1. Google’s traditional search result listings, against which it serves ads to generate much of its revenue, are less than ideal to scroll through on a smartphone.

They’re an impractical annoyance on a smart watch or smart television. And they’re impossible to implement safely in a moving car. Google plans to plug its software into all these devices—and many more—so it has begun to systematically rethink the way it presents results to users. The solution starting to take shape is a brew of Google’s myriad Internet services, ambitious artificial intelligence and massive troves of user data. It is accessible in two closely related products bundled in the company’s mobile app: voice search, which lets users speak their questions instead of typing them, and Google Now, a predictive service that shows users vital information before they actually go searching for it. The company’s hope is that, together, this transforms the concept of “Googling” from something that happens via a static search bar into a kind of ongoing conversation with an omniscient assistant, ready to step in and fulfill any request—even ones you haven’t thought about yet.

If Google doesn’t figure out how to make the perfect virtual assistant, another tech company will. Apple’s Siri is likely the most famous competitor, automatically installed on hundreds of millions of i. Phones and this year migrating to the Apple Watch and Apple TV. Microsoft’s Cortana is an integral part of its new operating system, Windows 1.

Amazon has released a smart home appliance called Echo that sits in your living room and awaits voice commands. Facebook has M, a digital assistant accessible through its Messenger mobile app. These companies view assistants as the way to control the cars, homes and other connected devices of the future. Every user need they can fulfill through their services is one less query being fed into the Google search box, and often, one fewer set of ads enticing users to click to destinations elsewhere. For Google, which will make an estimated $4. In a series of in- depth interviews, Google executives, designers and researchers provided TIME the clearest picture yet of the company’s plan to transform itself in the coming years.

Google had such a clear role in terms of connecting users to information on the desktop Web,” says Aparna Chennapragada, a product director for Google Now. What is the next Google? Is Google the next Google? That’s the kind of question we think about.”Amit Singhal has at least two obsessions: search and Star Trek. The 4. 7- year- old joined Google as its 1. He’s also been spreading the gospel of Star Trek, a franchise he’s loved since his time as a boy in the mountainous region of Uttar Pradesh, India. At one point the company’s voice search project was under the codename Majel, a reference to the woman who voiced the Starship Enterprise’s AI computer.

It’s no surprise that Singhal eventually combined his two passions in the form of a prototype wearable modeled after the communicator that Captain Picard and company use to interact with the Enterprise. The Bluetooth- enabled lapel pin, which Google has never before discussed publicly, is equipped with a microphone and is activated with a simple tap. The device, which could output sound through a speaker or accompanying headphones, allows users to talk to Google without having to fish out their cell phones.“I always wanted that pin,” says Singhal. You just ask it anything and it works. That’s why we were like, ‘Let’s go prototype that and see how it feels.’” The device has not made it past the testing phase, but it shows the extent to which Google engineers are willing to go to find a natural new way to search. Googlers regularly invoke the Star Trek computer or, more recently, Scarlett Johansson’s digital persona in the film Her, when laying out their vision for how people will interact with the company’s services in the future.

But there are a lot of knotty problems to solve first. The most challenging has to do with voice—both the voice of the user and the voice of the company’s computer persona that responds to human questions. In the old search box, Google interacts with users on purely transactional terms.

• Stranger Things is an American science fiction-horror web television series created, written, directed and co-executive produced by the Duffer Brothers, as well as co.
• It’s increasingly difficult to do anything on your phone nowadays without sharing your geolocation information. Certain Snapchat filters, Facebook status updates.

We type a half- formed thought into the query bar and wade through blue links until we find what we were after. Or we assume if it’s not indexed by Google, it probably doesn’t exist. Studies show people have gotten worse at remembering facts but better at remembering how to find them on the Internet. But when we open our mouths to search, the dynamic changes. Watch Cold Comes The Night Online Metacritic here. There’s suddenly an expectation that Google will not only hear and understand every word we say, but also that it will respond in a natural, concise way, like another person would.

Your phone has to be your friend,” says Francoise Beaufays, a research scientist at Google specializing in speech recognition.

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