And this brings us to the third household for Android, which is the connection line between all Android ecosystem products – artificial intelligence. Almost the entire Google’s opening speech has been spent for Gemini, the chatbot replacing the nine -year -old Google assistant in everything, Android Auto and Wear OS, smartphones and now Android XR. But that’s what Samat says makes Android XR unique, because it is the “first Android platform designed for the Gemini era”.
He continued with a group of examples, such as asking the Gemini to summarize the chapter of a book that you read according to the images he has captured when you return the pages, or by browsing your emails in Gmail for the answer to a question, hands free through the glasses. “This gives you superpowers when you put them,” says Samat.
Will this Ai-First Approach help change the minds of the Americans and put them on the Android train? Samat did not say, but he said that his 14 -year -old son had learned to do the laundry for the first time with Gemini on a Pixel 9 Pro. (Samat insists that his son has gladly chosen a pixel as a phone.) Using the new camera mode live from Gemini, where the assistant can see what you see via the camera of the phone, his son was able to ask which parameters to use for the linen load in front of him. Gemini identified the washing machine and properly offered the right parameters and instructions, which did not mean pink shirts that were originally white. “You first see the future on Android; everything comes on Android, so I really hope that people will take another look.”
The new Android XR platform arrives at a time when Google faces an incredible examination of regulatory organizations. The United States Ministry of Justice always wants the company to sell Chrome, and a jury decided that Google Play Store was an illegal monopoly. “Android is one of the most open operating systems ever created,” says Samat. “There are interesting myths – that Gemini can be the only AI assistant on Android, when it is very easy for consumers to choose others like Perplexity or Openai.”
But when asked for how Android XR will sail on these basic problems-Will Gemini be the only assistant on Android XR? Will applications be obliged to be deployed in an XR version of the Play Store, where Google collects up to 30% of sales? Samat says it’s too “early to talk about how it will work.” The first Android XR Mixed-Reality helmet arrives later this year, but it promises that the company “will not deviate from the opening of Android”.
Then there is the intimacy side of attaching cameras and microphones on a person’s face. More than 10 years ago, anyone carrying Google Glass was immediately nicknamed a “glass hole”, but as Meta’s intelligent glasses have shown, the world has a different level of comfort with smart glasses. However, it is not only a question of taking photos and videos for social media – the development of new glasses that can recognize the faces of people. Samat promises that Android XR will have a clear set of standards that manufacturers must follow, as well as on Android, to build around data sharing, security and confidentiality. “I think this is a very important problem, and we have learned a lot from the past.”
