When Google unveiled its latest mobile operating system to the world last week, the company asked a reserved but extremely confident man named Hugo Barra to grab the microphone, and celebrate Android 4.1 as the best mobile operating system the world has seen. It couldn’t have been easy to sing the praises of an OS code-named “Jelly Bean” with a completely straight face, but Barra, Android’s director of product management, was cool and composed as he shared Android’s latest killer features.
There was the new graphically enhanced search tool, Google Now. There was the new voice-based search assistant — Google’s answer to Apple’s Siri. And there was also a new piece of hardware — the Nexus 7 — which would show off Android’s full potential. Barra anchored all these announcements, reporting the Google I/O news that the world was most interested in hearing.
And now he speaks directly with Wired about Google’s mobile future. We sat down with Barra last week at Google I/O to pick his brain about the Nexus 7, and all the other key Android announcements. Here is the edited conversation.
Wired: Jelly Bean really has two major new features — Google Now and voice search. Walk us through the thinking behind these additions.
Hugo Barra: The concept of a card with some information in it [Google Now] isn’t actually new. For a long time, we’ve had the notion of “One Boxes.” Whenever Google presents information to you on top of search results — it’s sort of formatted in a particular way, and physically separate from the search results — we’ve called that a “One Box” for awhile. So we’ve taken that concept of a card with information in it just a few steps further by formatting it in a way that’s more appropriate for mobile devices and giving it a significant amount of visual polish. It’s not a new concept. It’s just an advancement of an existing concept when it comes to search.
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