Google Assistant will be the core of new hardware

Google CEO Sundar Pichai kicked off today's keynote event by emphasizing the company's shift in focus from "mobile first" to "AI first", and saying it wants to create a personal Google for each user. The company demonstrated the fruit of its efforts earlier this year by giving us a taste of its Assistant bot in its Allo messaging app. Pichai said for Assistant to be truly helpful, it needs to be available universally, and so the company today showed how it will be bringing the helper to phones and homes. Hardware chief Rick Osterloh detailed how the company is working on hardware built around Google Assistant, starting with the new Pixel phone. Google Assistant starts listening on the new Pixel phones when you hold down on the Home button (similar to how you'd activate Google Now before), or when you say the hotword ("Ok Google"). In a demonstration, Google Assistant brought up (and rattled off) a list of events from the Hearst Greek Theatre in response to a query about happenings there.