Pixel 8, Pixel Watch 2, and a lot of AI

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1:01What is going on, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. And I think it's safe to say this will be a Googly episode of the podcast because as Techtober rolls on, we had the Google event this week. They managed to surprise us with a lot of things. I had no idea what they were going to announce. They turned out to have been working on a phone, a watch. I'm surprised they made a phone. A bunch of software, just a crazy amount of surprises. So we'll get into all of that. That was also laced with sarcasm.

1:33I hope you could hear that. I can't even fake sarcastically pretend to be surprised. I was trying. I was trying. But we did get some stuff. What should we start with? Because we got Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro. We got Pixel Watch 2. We got some Google and Bard stuff. Yeah. And then we got a, there's also a bunch of software features. There's a Pixel Buds update. Oh yeah, software update. Yeah. Where do you want to begin? Do you want to start with a Pixel Buds software update? Yeah, let's just do that first. Okay, we'll get kind of in order. Let's do retention farming and just go worst to best. Let's go from the most boring stuff at the beginning.

2:05How dare you? Pixel Buds update. What was the Pixel Buds update? Okay, so yeah, they put out an update. They have two new colors. It comes in porcelain and bay now. Nice. Bay meaning blue. Yeah, because the bay area. Neat. That's what it's for. Blue sky. Yeah, Pacific Ocean. Water. Yeah. Wet. Nice. Anyway, so yeah, so the software update is that they now have a context-aware ambient mode. Basically, if you start talking, it'll turn on transparency mode, and then another person can talk to you, and it'll keep on transparency mode. But then as soon as they stop talking or after you stop responding, it goes back to playing your music and having it in noise cancellation.

2:49It's exactly what Apple added in the AirPods a couple of months ago. I used it at the event. The Pixel one? Yeah. Okay, how was it? Good. I'm excited to try it. My biggest issue with it is that it takes like a good second and a half, two seconds to actually kick in. Okay. So you start talking and then it goes, you wait like a beat or two and it goes, and then it's in ambient mode. People start talking and then you wait a little bit after they stop talking and it goes. and it's just kind of i don't like i don't really love this feature for the same reason i don't like it on the airpods pro the exact same reason i don't like it on the airpods pro it's like the consistency is good right like they wanted to have the whole ai aspect of it is that they want to know it is always you talking right if you want to go in transparency if you start talking then you probably want to hear things around you responding so let me turn on transparency mode but I just, no.

3:53Okay, I'll say two things. One, I tried the AirPods version. I thought it was really, really good. But then two, also, I've tried, there are other headphones that just like, I think they have a conversation mode where the second you start talking, it just pauses your music. And that's good enough for me. I'm not like singing along or like accidentally triggering it usually ever. so if i'm like on a flight like my habit is just like as soon as the flight attendant walks up i just take the headphones off but now i guess i kind of you could do the cup feature remember the sony cup feature yeah the cup makes it seem like you're trying harder not to listen to somebody it kind of does but you know this is a this is a clever way of doing it and you're right it is exactly the way apple's done it with adaptive adaptive audio audio is what they're calling it um i think it's cool i think it'll be turned on by some people i think it'll be ignored by other people but it's a good future to offer i feel like it's one of those things where in the case of airpods and the pixel buds pro it's like really good isn't good enough it needs this needs to be like perfect because it's already kind of awkward to not pull your headphone out when talking to someone to me it just seems rude but i don't use any of these yeah i will always pull a headphone out if i'm trying to talk to somebody i agree yeah so there's actually been a conversation around that with like is it rude to talk to people with earbuds in yeah this is a this is a thing there is a small i don't know how small it is but there is a subculture in certain cities where everyone walks around with their headphones in all day and never takes them out yeah and it's totally normal for them to talk to someone who has their headphones in and they also have their headphones in and that's normal a lot of times it's airpods a lot of times it's whatever else i feel so rude doing that but this feature is designed for those people who think it's totally normal yeah i think there's also eventually be normal to everyone i think i totally agree with that it will be normal to everyone but i think there's a small difference between what both of you said where if you are the one with the headphones starting the conversation then it's like is this rude there are people who like to have headphones on as a way of saying like i do not want to be talked to right now yeah and that's why you buy over your headphones at this point if you're talking to buy over your headphones unless you want to shut people up yeah that's the difference between earbuds and that's the main difference at this point yeah it's true no i i guess i i see it there's like two versions one is you start the conversation the other is the other person started so if i i'm gonna go order uh food somewhere i walk up to the counter and start talking then it'll work because i'm gonna get a response a few seconds later yeah the other version is someone taps you on the shoulder and starts talking and you're listening the music and you don't hear them until you somehow manage to activate the mode by talking that's that's a good question if you are because it's trying to pick up your voice first right so if you tap me on the shoulder say a whole sentence and then i have to go like hold on my adaptive uh headphones haven't started coming out yet let me say another whole sentence and then can you repeat yourself and then it comes in that's yeah i will say it's really really good at knowing like that someone is continuing to talk to you versus just ambient background noise.

7:02It's really good at distinguishing that. So it keeps it in transparency mode until you fully stop talking for like a second and a half or so. But the biggest issue right now is how long it takes to trigger and un-trigger. But of course they need that because they don't want it accidentally going off all the time. That would be worse. You know, it's annoying that it like, that it mutes your music or your podcast or whatever you're listening to. So I don't know. I'm personally more of a fan of manual pause, take your butt out, talk for a while, put back in. That's what I'm going to keep doing. But I think that, like you said, Andrew, a generation of people are going to eventually grow up just where it's natural.

7:39And Google, even in their marketing, they were like, now you never need to take your earbuds out. That literally was in their marketing. Glue them in, baby. Never charge them. I didn't get to try them, but I have to say, if you think they are even slightly impressive in a demo unit where there's probably 50 other people talking and trying them as well. It was in an isolated sound chamber. Never mind. I was going to say, if that was like show floor, that would be super impressive. Show floor would be crazy impressive. That would be crazy. The demo that I got from Apple was also in like a small room with like seven people in it.

8:12It worked amazing. I'm sure it did. But it is what it is. Yeah. The other thing that is really nice is it now supports Bluetooth super wideband, which basically doubles the bandwidth. So now phone calls should sound a lot better. Because the biggest issue with phone calls is the Bluetooth bandwidth just compresses the hell out of your voice until it just is this like thing. So it'll be nice to actually hear better. That's how all my phone calls sound. Yeah. Although super wideband is exclusive to Pixel 8 and newer. So you have to use the new phones for that. um and then clear calling yeah really dope obviously we showed that in the video that we made um and it sounds really good removes background noise extremely well so this is another thing that like has existed in the iphone for a one year of software now where there's a toggle to switch microphone modes and it removes background noise and it works really well yeah and now google's like yeah okay yeah we can do that too and we'll just built in noise cancellation in all phone calls.

9:14Has that been that long? Because they just showed that in the event this year. So I thought it was just this year. iOS 17. Okay. Yeah. This one's just for phone calls and it's on by default for all calls. Yeah. I think they're using similar technology because in the video features of the Pixel 8, they also have Magic Eraser Audio. Audio Magic Eraser is what they call it. What is it called? It's called Audio Magic Eraser, which I think they'll probably eventually rebrand. That's a bad name. I think it's just kind of what they... it's very cool though they showed me a demo of it and you take a video and it has a bunch of different sounds you hit edit audio and then it separates all the sounds and it's like talking wind um nature this and you can adjust each of those individual frequencies to go away so you can just take the wind away or you can just take the talking where you can just take the the like barking away this is going to if this works the way it's supposed to in the demo room it worked really well revolutionizes me shooting autofocus videos that's true because every poor ellis over there every time i shoot autofocus videos it is me it is a lot of wind and it is a lot of beeping and train noises from that whatever is going on back there every single time ellis versus ai part two it's just how much can i get rid of it that's always a question feeling like a horse in a room full of henry fords right now boys let me tell you it's just that is the perfect use case because i shoot those videos on a phone so i am i am looking to the built-in features i shot one on a pixel last year and i was using the wind removal feature and it was okay but this if it works is going to be cool yeah and then there's also a new low latency mode um that gets automatically activated whenever a compatible game gets launched um oh it's only for uh that's what it says here i don't know i guess i he did say like into for the gamers out there I said for the gamers, and I was hoping that meant like you could use it while you're playing on your computer.

11:12Like you could use it on the computer. Because the Mac now has that gaming mode that if you're wearing AirPods doubles the sample rate. I was really hoping that that would work on Pixel Buds as well. I don't know. Maybe that'll come later. Yeah. So they basically saved all of these updates to introduce the new colors today. Feature drop. Those all went out. Nice feature drop. Those all went out today. Okay. At least everyone that already had Pixel Buds Pro is getting all the updates. although some of them only work on pixel 8 so there's that okay um swoon to the watch yes that is the next boring thing hey man the pixel watch 2 okay okay so if you haven't already seen our first impressions video these are getting into things i did cover now which was i covered both the phones and the watch so the new pixel watch 2 is the same price as last year 350 bucks and it looks visually basically the same it's the same small puck the same ultra modern minimal design with like the one button on the side the curved screens around the outside same bezel size and everything but the major things they've changed are one it's got a new chip new quad core chip they're very proud of yeah two snapdragon a new snapdragon chip yeah so performance and battery life should potentially be improved from that we'll see two is uh they did they have a bunch of new sensors on the back of your wrist to potentially have more accurate and more reliable heart rate sensor information.

12:34There are basically multiple heart rate sensors now, and because they can average all of those sensors from different parts of your wrist, they can get more accurate information. Great. And then there's just a couple new software features. There's also a temperature sensor. Yes, skin temperature sensor. Skin temperature, yeah. Which you're definitely going to use all the time. Apparently it helps with sleep tracking, is what they said. Yeah. It helps with sleep tracking. Are eight sleeps? No, our temperature, right? I think so. No, they don't. No, your body. I guess it knows its own temperature because it's changing.

13:02They have heart rate sensors though. Yeah. I still don't know. But yeah, it's a better sleep tracking. I know nothing about how you track sleep anyways. So like I could see how temperature could potentially be something. Yeah. But I don't know. I think most of it is heart rate. Like heart rate is very important to the pixel watch. And when you listen to them talk about the new sensors, they make a big deal about heart rate. They're like hurry variants, heart rate sampling. We want it to be much more accurate. They sample it way more often. Yeah. And so during vigorous activity. Well, the thing is, the regular everyday sampling during the course of your day will probably look the same.

13:40But it's during vigorous activity, running around, high heart rate variance type stuff, then it should be more accurate than it was in the past. So we'll have to test that. I'll take it to a practice. Yeah. And yeah, then there's a couple other features. Safety check. Nice. So if you walk home, you want someone to be able to check in on you. you don't check in it contacts them i think safety check in all these different devices we're seeing is might be like one of the most important features we're seeing in like the last year that is just such a good idea that could make so many people so much safer and it's feels like they could have done this five years ago but just like a really simple like hey i'm walking home check on me and if i don't make it in x amount of time maybe call someone i know yeah when I reach a certain destination.

14:26It's just such a good idea. I'm glad to see everything having it. You can see the commercials riding themselves. Yeah. Basically. As this happens. What else? There's some new auto workout start and stop detection. Yeah. That was actually a pretty major thing. Pretty happy about that. I think that auto stop is actually more useful to me than auto start. 100%. I always remember to start it, but sometimes I get off the bike and just walk away. I just forget. I think Ellis did that today. at lunch he was like my watch thinks i've been playing ping pong for three hours yeah auto start stop that's useful yeah um what else uh it's improved battery life 24 hours of use with the always on display now um previously it used to be without the always on display is that what the metric was okay yeah because i forgot what the old metric was i just remember it was not good yeah and i appreciate that they're showing at least a stat with always on display on because it's so easy for all these different things to be like this is your battery life when you turn basically nothing on yeah i'm trying to remember did the pixel watch have always on display disabled out the box yeah it did are they are they going to enable it out the box it is it is enabled out the box okay yeah that's a meaningful difference the pixel watch is a good looking watch when always on display is on it looks great like when you actually have things or else it just looks like a weird dome so yeah i appreciate that that's on i mean they needed to improve the battery life on that thing for sure.

15:50Yeah. So one thing that I think they need to get better at is they have six months of Fitbit premium for free quote quote quote because the quotes are because you still have to sign up to pay monthly or in or yearly. So you still have to like put in your credit card information and then do the first six months or whatever and that gets you like a lot of the Fitbit premium features but like the one one thing that the Apple Watch really has over it is that just has all the exercise stuff just for free you know there's like fitness plus yeah but fitness plus is everything outside of the watch and the watch just kind of like tracks yeah it's like all these exercises and stuff i don't subscribe to um fitness plus apple fitness plus because it's just classes that i don't take but you're right like tons of fitness tracking from how many steps you take to how long you walk to analyzing your trends and all these other things all built into apple health that's all free that all just comes with having an iphone and apple watch yeah just cut your ties with fit i know i just want it to go straight to my phone like i'm in the google ecosystem for a reason stop pulling me out it's just a weird like i think that they bought fitbit in order to like get a head start on all the fitness stuff but the problem is both the brands are too strong yeah and it's now fitbit with google i've i can kind of understand the first time they did it because Fitbit did have a good name and people were buying Fitbits, but I don't think people were buying Fitbits as smartwatches.

17:17It's like its own category. No, they just launched the Fitbit Charge 6 like two or three days ago as a recording. And it has like a very basic screen that has like the time and maybe it'll send you like icons of notifications, but it's not a smartwatch. And I think that that's what they're doing on purpose. They're trying to differentiate like if you want a smart band, but I'm wondering how many people still use smart bands instead of just using a smartwatch. I think a lot of people do actually. There's like a lot of people, especially, I've learned this from Claire's insurance has you get like 20 bucks off a month if you hit X amount of steps in a month.

17:50And I think people will buy cheaper activity trackers like that for stuff like that because if you're saving 20 bucks a month and a Fitbit's under$200, like you wear that for a few years and you're making money. Fitbit used to offer one that was just a pedometer that you put in the back of your shoe and i i wish they would make like an ankle bracelet you could go to jail you can get an ankle bracelet it's not gonna be easy but you can get one yeah it's just like i would i don't really like using smart watches that much anymore and i but i wish i could still get a lot of that information like on a place on my body that isn't really obvious that i have like a smart device well that's the thing about the phone stuff google fit on your phone tracks which is being your pocket and just count your steps and do all that stuff and the same thing now on the apple watch this or the iphone this year the health app the fitness app is on the phone just counting your steps and counting metrics yeah so it's like pedometer and stuff but you don't get any of that additional information i think you still get trends whether it's like trends of activity up and down over time how many steps you know it's not gonna have like heart rate and all that stuff but it's like basic information yeah yeah yeah well we'll try the watch i'm definitely curious if the battery life is meaningfully different because that was one of my big complaints with the last one when I turn always on display on.

19:11Do we want to talk about Bard and AI stuff right now or do we want to do trivia? I think we do Bard now because then we're going to talk about the phones and that'll be a while. Okay. There's a lot of stuff here. And I didn't watch the entire keynote, but this is basically the way I understand it. Google Assistant combining with Bard. That's the main thing that's happening. Google Assistant combining with Bard. So now there are generative AI features inside of Google Assistant. So you can ask Google Assistant to summarize a web page that you're on, and it will look at your screen in Chrome and read the whole web page and give you a generative AI summary, things like that.

19:46So the idea is more of the features from this BARD experiment are going to be surfaced to people who use Google Assistant regularly. Lots of interesting stuff that that could open up the possibilities of. I'm curious if you guys have favorite stuff that you saw, but I kind of like the summary webpage thing seems like very reliable to me. If I just go real quick, because I know David will go on for the next 45 minutes on this. I mean, this is exactly what we just talked about with Copilot last week with like Amazon Alexa and ChatGPT stuff a few weeks ago. Just like all of this generative AI inside of the assistants will make these assistants so much better because it's just like conversation based and they understand context and this can use your text voice images it can take actions on your phone yeah all of this is going again probably the third week in a row it's going to be the new tech support that we never have to deal with again it's going to make using technology for people who don't know technology so so much easier and that's a huge win yeah yeah i'm picturing like my my grandma using i don't know if she's gonna do it but like asking the assistant to do something that you would think is like an insane request like can you order the flowers from the site from the thing and then it just does it yeah like oh my god it actually works that's how all of us feel though when somebody asks us something and we're like well i can just google it and they're like how do i google it's like google is very good just literally type what you told me on the phone and google probably figures it out yeah that's what this is now and like assistant is just already the best out of all of them yeah so now we're getting bard on top of that yeah it's just gonna be awesome it's kind of supercharging like a lot of the things that the assistant already was able to do and i think when bard first launched we were kind of like why isn't this just google assistant better and i've i am predicting that within the next two years the bard branding goes away and it just gets rebundled into assistant you think so this is going to be like better google assistant hear me out what if assistant gets bundled into bard i feel like assistant's such a better name than bar i would so much rather say hey bard than hey but google is the strongest brand name in the world as far as like i just want to stop saying hey also like the amount of devices you did it you did it andrew the amount of devices that are already out in the wild that use the hey g keyword is insane like and so it'd be a lot easier to software update those to on the back end just be a lot better at your queries than it is to totally change i don't care about ease i care about what i want google dieter i mean if they allowed you to just change the keyword like with amazon you can say hey alexa you can also say um hey computer you know they let you say like three or four different things yeah maybe there's two maybe it's dual keywords google's such a pain in the neck to say every time that's the slippery slope though is you want it to be slightly irregular of a word because if it's too easy it's going to accidentally yeah then you get a serious issue and then yeah so you just say hey mom and it says oh did you say hey bard and you're like yeah that wasn't that close but it thinks it yeah so you gotta be sorry yeah it's all good i feel like assistant with bard is just kind of like the natural progression of what they want assistant to be right because now it can i mean google says it's always always been able to like look at your display and like see what's on your display and stuff but now it can do things contextually with that um so it it understands a lot more and it can bundle into your other Google apps that you have, too.

23:14Like, a couple of weeks ago, they announced BARD extensions, which allowed you to, like, access things in your email and do this and that. And, you know, we've talked about it last week. Like, I think Casey Newton tried it, and it was not great for him. Like, it was making up emails that he had never sent. I mean, I needed to cite his sources. Yeah, exactly. Which, by the way, the source citing on the new ARC version is amazing. That's a great shout out. Yeah. So speaking of, this is a total tangent, but speaking of AI features, this browser that David put us on, this, what is it called? Arc browser.

23:48Arc browser, yeah. Has this big new update where they added a bunch of AI features. Yeah. And they're actually genuinely very useful. And one of them is just, hey, summarize this webpage for me. So if I'm on a webpage, I ask it for a summary. And then it cites the part of the website that it's drawing that fact from. So if I highlight a sentence and I want, like, where did you read that? it scrolls down and highlights the sentence that says what it was and it doesn't pull the exact sentence like it generates a new sentence to make it simpler but when you like you you can see where on page it brings you exactly to where it brought it yeah so you know when it's making something up or if it is actually drawing from the actual page yeah that's that's good ai yeah that's google do a little more of that please yeah yeah citing sources yeah they have they also have like find in page where you do control F or command F to do to do find in page but if you can't find in page you just type a question about the page and it creates like a gen AI answer about the page really good anyway uh back to bard um it's yeah it's basically just like a supercharged google assistant and this is I think what everyone sort of always assumed that google assistant was supposed to be um so now it can look at things on your screen it can access things in your email it is a lot more of like a generalized assistant at least as far as plugging into google services yeah because i wanted it to be yeah yeah at io i thought i think we all assumed this is what happens i just wasn't expecting it to be five months later yeah like already i mean chat gbt basically added um multimodal support like two weeks ago and then like like flies dropping it was just like amazon microsoft google like we're kind of moving towards that omniscient kind of ai at this point yeah um so unfortunately uh assistant with bard is not out yet it's coming later which is sad so many as are so many of these things yeah yeah i was curious apple did a couple of these now google's doing a couple of these later this it's a trend that i don't like i'm with you yeah it's weird that we don't know when exactly some of them would say like next month some of them are saying december later this year yeah early next year i don't like that it's weird that they don't just like wait to release it or finish the feature first i'm sure it wasn't the one of the first ones i remember was that iphone um what was it called it's probably a picture feature it was a picture feature where it was like increasing the resolution or something oh uh it was um the like middle light detail it was yeah why can't i remember what it was the photonic engine has this feature i forgot what is it called what was it what are you talking about It would like make your fine detail in pictures It had a very distinct name I want to say it was probably like iPhone 11 or 12 Not Photonic Engine It had a different name I just remember it being a like Oh Deep Fusion Thanks for the deep one Deep Fusion felt like the first one And that was like this very small thing And a huge list of stuff they announced It took forever to launch Now it feels like 50 % of the features they mention on a phone between the iPhone event and the Google event yeah aren't coming out till months at least a month there were a couple years in a row we were right that started with deep fusion where the iPhone every year would have like one camera feature that would be coming later yeah and every time I reviewed the phone on it I would have to be like I I guess we'll see because it's not out at the time of this review and then the next year there was another single camera feature and the next year there's another single camera feature but you're right now I feel like there's a couple things both with cameras and other stuff on the phone that are coming later or that are either about to come out or not yet yeah even on even double tap on the apple watch is still not out yet not out on the watch until sometime soon i feel like every product in the last apple event had at like two things that weren't coming out when it was launched it's weird and it's it just makes me think a lot about you've always said like don't buy things based on future promises and we're getting to the point where half of the features are future promises and it's yeah i don't think it's a good look yeah in general if you are trying to buy any of these things i would buy it assuming that that feature is never going to come like for real that's true because half of this we're going to talk about the software features on the pixel in a little bit and a lot of them are not going to launch with the phone i would buy the phone assuming you never get that feature yeah and maybe someday in the future they'll they'll put it on the phone and it'll be a bonus for you but that's still true about every gadget or that's going to be way worse than they probably like deep fusion remember it barely did anything yeah like we waited months for it and then it came and everyone was excited and it was like that maybe looks like one percent better if i squint yeah if you take the photo in just the perfect dim lighting yeah maybe see more detail yeah yeah um but yeah with this with this bart assistant thing one of the examples that they give is like you've got a picture of your puppy on your phone and then you pull it up and you say write me a cute social media post about my puppy and it just does it and it just like contextually writes one but it's like i remember why are we just making all the computers talk to the computers we talked about this at io remember like how it's like drafting social media posts you guys were mad at the face swap making my own social media post feels so much a line crossed so much yeah that's the social media post thing though i'm like what this feels weird especially if we're having our computers like scrape to gain like the general consensus of other people's yeah posts and then all those other posts are made by ai too it's like what are we i also feel like they probably use the example of a dog because a dog's not gonna care that i didn't write a social media post for it but you sure as hell know that i can be like write my mom a really nice birthday message that i post publicly and it's like greatest mom in the world and then like she finds out that i didn't i asked bard to write that that's the most oh my i hate just thinking about that mom i love you i will i will write real messages to you i will still put photo editing features on the other side of the line we'll get to we'll get to that later but we'll get to that later yeah so i think that the overall with the bard and assistant stuff it's like they're gonna to introduce all of these flashy things that you can do with it but the most important thing which is going to be just the way we interact with computers in the future is that you can just interact with them more naturally and that's that's like a low-key like not super exciting not flashy thing but the fact that like you can talk to your computer and it knows what you're talking about even if you don't use the very specific keywords you're supposed to use with a smart device is a big deal.

30:38I mean, think of what every quality of life small update is on anything. It's to make usability better. This is like the quality of life update for tech. Yeah. If my grandma can interact with it, then that's important. It lowers the barrier of entry of every advanced feature, which is pretty sick. So yeah, so that's coming later. They're testing it with a limited number of testers right now, whatever that means. Yeah, I won't hear this tribute. um otherwise yeah we got new call screening with the more human voice which was cool did you see that demo yeah i'll do that in the pixel features because i'll count it as a pixel feature so i'll get to them cool so i think let's take a quick break yeah we'll do a trivia question and then we'll do pixel phones okay the lights are back the lights are back it was i can't tell you what The lights are back and Adam's gone.

31:31Coincidence? Whoa. No, yeah, I got it where I think this thing is fussy, man. It kicks and it screams and then you get it under control and it's happy. Anyway, question number one. I'm doing both questions this week. Oh, boy. It's been a while. Oh, boy. Question number one. What was the first Pixel to have a sip made by Google? Wait, but Google doesn't call it a sip. They call this piece a sip. Did they really? Yes, they do. I thought Apple was the only one. that did that let me rephrase this the wikipedia page for this piece of silicon refers to it as a sip exclusively wait so say that again oh say the question again there is a piece of silicon made by google uh-huh which wikipedia refers to as a sip okay and a processor and package right system package sure what was the first pixel okay now i've gone too far so you've What was the first Pixel to have a SIP made by Google?

32:30To have silicon in it that Google designed and had manufactured? Oh, this is such a trick question. It's not. You silly, silly man. It's not a trick question. It's a straightforward question. Sure it is. Okay. I'm writing down my answer in advance. Yeah. Do you know? I have a guess. I do not know, but we'll see if I'm right. I have an idea, but we'll see. All right. We'll be right back.

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34:04Not all journalism is the same. Take The Guardian. Our coverage has something unique. Fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say. So we're free to report the whole picture. We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe. Expose corruption wherever we find it and give first perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture the climate and more read watch and listen to the guardian for free at theguardian.com all right welcome back let's talk pixel smartphones new generation of pixel phones pixel 8 and 8 pro right off the top more expensive than last year we've got plus 100 for each of them,$999 and$699.

34:49So$699 for the Pixel 8,$999 for the Pixel 8 Pro. And so with these higher prices, we go, well, what's new about them? What's more expensive? What's better about them? And there's quite a few interesting things. I'll start with the new Tensor. The temperature sensor? It's on the list, but I can't say I think it made it more expensive. No, I'll start Tensor G3. That's going to be in both. I think I have a lot of hopes just about efficiency and battery life. and Tensor G2 was okay, but it wasn't good. It was perfect. So I think what we're hoping is that Tensor G3 gives us, maybe not a huge improvement on raw power, because that wasn't necessarily what was bad about it, but it was just inefficient and it was not great with batteries.

35:34So we're hoping for that to be better. But naturally, the focus of Tensor G3 is the TPU, a lot of AI-related features, and we'll get to those. But Tensor G3. But then there's the other two new things, which is new cameras and new screens on these phones. So there's the two different sizes, Pixel 8 and 8 Pro are different sizes. Also the 8 Pro is a higher resolution as always. But also now the Pixel 8 is 120 hertz. So it's no longer, it was 90 hertz previously. So it's up to 120 hertz. It's not LTPO. I think it's - 60 and 120. Yeah, 60 and 120. The Pro is still LTPO. It'll go all the way down to one hertz.

36:08They're also both flat, I'll just say that. So they're not like curving over the edge on the Pro, which I think is nice. the bezels look pretty much the same all the way around there's no more chin remember how the we had like a chin on those previous pixels that's slowly been shrinking over the years it feels like it's pretty much even all the way around and then they they felt the need to name this new brightness but they are legitimately some of the brightest screens i've ever seen in smartphones and this is just from the hour that i spent with it but they're calling it an actual display on the pixel 8 and it's super actual display on the 8 pro yeah 2 000 nits on the pixel 8 and 24 4400 nits on the pixel 8 pro yeah um i will be fact checked on this but i'm fairly sure that's the brightest smartphone screen i've ever seen in my life it's i think the same as the oppo find x6 pro right okay it might be i don't know but i i looked at it and i said oh my god this is the brightest screen i've ever seen there's probably like a lumio from like seven years ago where it's one feature was like 3 000 nits but it but it is genuinely very impressive and i know that when i take these things outside they're gonna look great outside oppo claims it can reach 2500 oh so oppo is technically still slightly wider my bad my bad but still on a pixel usually you don't get crazy big hardware numbers on pixels it's all about the software but that was cool to see yeah um eight gigs of ram with tensor g3 battery sizes are both like a tiny bit bigger than last year not like a meaningful amount i think we'll still look for tensor to give us that difference in efficiency and then new cameras um same primary camera on both it's a i believe a 50 megapixel sensor then you get either the 12 megapixel ultra wide on the pixel 8 or you get a 48 megapixel ultra wide with macro on the 8 pro alongside a 48 megapixel 5x telephoto on the 8 pro so i got a new camera suite i didn't notice that wait so they left the worst ultra wide in the regular one and gave you a better ultra ride with macro in the pro in the pro yeah i think this year they definitely are trying to justify the price gap the price gap yeah because it's still a 300 difference between the phones yeah and if i'm looking at it like those two phones 300 apart have the same tensor g3 have the same primary camera and both have incredibly bright 120 hertz displays that's you gotta really start to squint again to find the differences between them and it's going to be like okay an extra telephoto camera extra resolution if you want it which is not even on by default like stuff like that um but that's the main hardware differences and then once you get into using the phones it is all software baby it is the classic pixel story of and i think this is probably going to be the theme of the review oh eight and 12 gigs of ram did you say that oh 12 on the pro 12 on the pro okay eight gigs around on eight 12 on the pro yeah okay so that's you get more ram will anybody pay 300 bucks to get more ram i don't know maybe but it's there yeah um but i think yeah the the story with the pixel is definitely that you you kind of just accept that the hardware is just going to be fine and they've had this design for a couple years now with the visor and i was actually just thinking about this the visor which is like so iconic to the pixel it still collects dust like in the corners right above and below it you had this with your pixel right just like it seems to be something that like a lot of these newer it's it specifically happens with the pixel because of the big visor but yeah just filming a lot of macros with iphones the new lenses on the new iphones do it all around the circles as well like it's bad oh yeah it's so annoying to do robot shots you have a case but like cleaning that out is so annoying and i like i use a case or use the case on my pixel and when i go climbing i take the case off and there's just chalk yeah caked on both of them yeah on both on like the top and the bottom of the visor yeah so you know you're not you're not i guess my point is you're not buying a pixel for the hardware quality it's still gonna be it's still gonna look like a pixel uh so has i think there's now there's new colors and there's like a satin back on the pro which is i like that right or sorry yeah on both is it both yeah okay which is sweet they're matte textured like yeah they're like a satin slash like velvety satin is a good way which i really appreciate all the new iphones as well um but you're really buying it because it's the smartest smartphone it's got google assistant you're talking about call screening i use call screening a lot wait no wait really before we get into that oh yeah all the time i'm just going to iterate that that doesn't mean all the pixel hardware sucks it's not it just means the software is incredible and that's why you're buying i guess what i'm saying is if you want to buy a smartphone because it has the craziest biggest numbers and the best hardware you're not buying the pixel it's just not the pixel it's either some of xiaomi or oppo or samsung phone they all have bigger more impressive numbers xperia i don't know there's like a slight tilt to the camera stuff there but like you think about 100x zoom when you think about 75 watt charging like that's not the pixel experience yeah yeah yeah but i just want to make sure sure i know there's people who took that that thing you're trying i'll take it my words i mean what i say i mean what i say now sorry i interrupted a ls marquez call screen conversation i was ready so i regularly get calls some random numbers that i don't know and five times out of ten it's a delivery and the other five times i'm so glad i had call screening because it's just a random person and i just you know you just hit the button and it says screen my call and it's just some guy going is this is this marquez and i just hit hang up or it's just a delivery person going like hi i'm outside and then i like pick up or i just say like yeah you can leave the package or whatever do they stay on the phone no so a lot A lot of people, that's another good point.

41:47Probably three or four out of 10 times when the assistant is done answering the phone, they just hang up right away. And I just never find out who it was. And that's fine too. I didn't have to talk on the phone. But this year, the new call assistant is both much more human sounding and will give you context aware chips to press to respond based on what it hears the person say. Yeah. Which means pretty if a UPS driver calls me and it's an unknown number and I don't pick up unknown numbers and I hit screen call and it says, hey, I'm a Google assistant screening this call. Who are you? And it sounds like a human and the person doesn't pick up.

42:27They will say, hi, I'm the UPS driver. I have a package for you without me even picking up the call. It will show a box that I can press that just says leave it on the front porch or something like that. I press it. It says it in a human voice. and the person probably doesn't even think twice about the fact that it's a robot and they'll just do it. And I don't know. As long as they don't hang up immediately when they hear I'm a Google assistant. I think because the last one sounded such a like robotic. Yeah. People hung up early. Yeah, this one sounds really natural. This one sounds like a person.

42:54Yeah, totally. Yeah. In theory, I think this sounds great. I'll be interested to see how it does because that last one, I don't know a single person that ever stayed on the line long enough for the old call screening to ever like. there we're just so used to getting robocalls have you heard the new voice i heard the new voice it does sound better it's pretty good there's a lot of spam calls that sound really damn good these days too and i turn that off immediately i guess it's just if you're calling someone you're already expecting to hear a voice pick up yeah so they might not even process the first two words which are like i am a google assistant here's my counter to that there are fedex people who knock on my door when i'm home who don't even knock on the door they just put the missed delivery slip on before even knocking you think those people are gonna like listen to my robot assistant answer they probably won't they ain't got time if they do go through the trouble of calling and they were expecting a human to pick up this accomplishes the same task does this new one can it make reservations for you are we just done with the reservation that is a separate uh feature so this is just screening incoming calls i don't know that this new voice will apply to that i don't know just good question we'll see it'd be nice or it's just something google killed again yeah i don't know actually probably should be killed but there's a bunch of new other software stuff there's a new camera ui i think it looks better it's kind of separated into photos and videos at the bottom and then there's all the sort of controls right above it uh night sight video got added there's a bunch of new hdr processing looks just better in general i mean we'll have to test for quality manual controls are dope they look really good there are so many manual controls and it like puts aperture iso and shutter speed at at the top in these little bars and you can just adjust them and it has focus peaking like for photography nerds it's really really built out yeah all right before we get even deeper on some of the madness that is the pixel and all of its software we'll take a quick break we'll do some trivia and we'll come right back

44:59all right we're doing google trivia today it's a googly day um i have in front of me four google products and services uh quick completely coincidentally i think uh almost all of them have been discontinued at this point but i need you to tell me which one i made up It's one of those. Oh boy. Long, it's been a minute? Yes. Yeah. Ready? All right. Number one is called Google Lively. Google Lively is essentially MetaHorizon, but it was before VR was invented. So it was just with a mouse and keyboard. Other than that, it is like hilariously similar to MetaHorizon. So like Second Life? Horizon Worlds, you mean?

45:43Is that what it's called? Whatever. That thing. But what makes it different than Second Life is that Google imagined like different websites and IPs would set up their own thing and that it would gradually become how you surf the web. They just abandoned it because they thought it would never be a thing. Hilarious. B, Google Fibonacci. Google Fibonacci was a really complex like API for devs that would analyze really, really, really long strings of numbers. This is what, which one is real? Which one is fake? Oh, okay. Got you. C is the Google crisis response team. The Google crisis response team is a team within Google that seeks to make critical information more accessible during times of natural disasters.

46:35The Google crisis response team. I hope that's real just because you said most of these are discontinued. So if they had a crisis response team and then discontinued it. Crisis response team is their PR team. Wow. And D, this is all caps, GOOG411. G-O-O-G 411. It is a telephone-based voice search service to get business information. So you'd call GOOG411 and be like, I need Blockbuster's number or something. I don't know. Nice. Blockbuster. So yeah. A, Google Lively. B, Google Fibonacci. C, Google Crisis Response. Or D, the GOOG411. Which one's fake? Which one is fake? Got you. Okay. We'll think on it.

47:22I've already thought on it. We'll think on it. We'll be right back.

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