
Google’s Pixel Buds won’t change the world - plg
https://www.1843magazine.com/technology/the-daily/no-googles-pixel-buds-wont-change-the-world
======
reaperducer
I've read a lot of very critical reviews of Pixel Buds, but I'm not sure this
rises to the level of "Silicon Valley Arrogance."

But you know what does?

\- iPod headphones with wires that get brittle in the cold, so they pop out of
your ears during a Chicago winter. \- iPhones that go into emergency thermal
shutdown from being in your pocket on a spring/summer day in Arizona. \- An
iMessage applet ecosystem that assumes that every iPhone user lives his life
like a 20-year-old San Francisco metrosexual. (Launch day was Uber, OpenTable,
and bill splitting. Yay.)

How about Silicon Valley offer some apps and accessories for the 99.99999% of
the world that doesn't live in your climate? Or doesn't live your lifestyle?
Stop patting yourselves on the back for staring at your own bellybutton.

(This isn't meant to be an Apple-specific rant; that's just the ecosystem I'm
most familiar with.)

~~~
pavel_lishin
Weirdly enough, I feel like Google Maps and anything Yelp-like has the
opposite problem in New York. When I search for something nearby, "two miles
away" isn't remotely relevant when it's across the Hudson, in another state.

They tried to build a single system that works for everyone, and it works kind
of okay unless you're on the edge of a bell curve, geographically speaking.

~~~
cptskippy
And in Atlanta I experience the opposite problem. Google Maps will limit
searches to things close by, suggest alternates instead of exact matches, and
routinely fails to find locations that I know exist forcing me to manually
select them on the map.

Unlike NY, in Atlanta everything is a 30 minute drive so convenience is less
about distance.

~~~
icebraining
If you adjust the zoom, doesn't it suggest a new search and then find the
correct place? Seems to work for me.

~~~
cptskippy
If you adjust zoom you're given the option to search that area but it doesn't
do it by default and by default it zooms into a narrow radius around your
current location.

------
peeters
It is kind of a UX curiosity. When people don't speak the same language, they
are trained to have a third party "translator" to defer to. You speak, I watch
you. Then I watch the translator. Then I speak, and so on.

That translator could be a person, a phone running Translate, a notepad you're
drawing pictures on, whatever. The point is, you have something physical
acting as the intermediary and so it's natural to direct your attention to it.

With the Pixel Buds, they're taking that physical manifestation away but the
problem is under the hood nothing has changed. So you're still having this
fragmented three-way conversation, but now there is no physical intermediary
that makes it feel natural.

~~~
chrisseaton
When you're trained to work with a translator, you're actually trained to
_not_ watch them - you keep eye contact with the other person the whole time
and just listen to the translator, and it isn't a three-way conversation.

~~~
peeters
Good point, and that's kind of where I'm coming from--when I said "people are
trained" I meant implicitly, for regular people who would only encounter this
rarely. So is this similarly just a question of user training to break from
the "natural" interaction?

------
danielam
"It is small contribution to the vast corpus of complaints about what happens
to product design when an engineer’s focus on problem solving blinds them to
the norms of social interaction."

Product design is part of engineering. Good engineering entails solving the
actual problem within the actual constraints. In this case, ignoring the
constraints of social interaction is bad engineering.

------
fredley
A very interesting observation about the shared public experience of both
talking into a phone, vs. the semi-private experience of receiving one half of
the conversation in your 'Buds.

This echoes at least part of what made talking to people wearing Google Glass
so odd - you didn't know what they could see, or where their mind was. In the
same way having a conversation with someone while you glance at your phone is
rude – because it creates an unevenness of attention – any interaction where
you have a private component publicly and visibly involved is going to be
awkward.

------
ashraymalhotra
This is a really good observation. I ponder a lot on UX of new products and
have to accept I didn’t think of this before. But I do expect Google to have
realised this problem in their user testing (if it involved non techies at
all). Pixel buds feels like a product rushed to market (because they had to
remove the headphone jack?) and not well thought out/implemented.

------
andrewgjohnson
Did anyone really thing Pixel Buds were going to be the must-have headphones
for everyone? It was a cool example of applied technology that grabbed a bunch
of headlines and gave people something to think about (what if I could talk to
everyone regardless of language?)

The slides in the office are there to get press; the earphones that are
clearly not going to be a huge seller are there to get press.

------
gehwartzen
Can someone explain what the 'secret sauce' is in Pixel Buds that makes them
unique? If the phone/internet is doing the translating why cant any
earbuds/heaphones with a mic connected to the same phone with the same
software do the same thing?

~~~
khedoros1
Maybe they do something special with noise cancelling? I think it's mostly "We
want to sell these, so we're only activating this feature if you use them."

------
dgritsko
> "However effective a gadget is, it will fail if it makes its user feel like
> a chump."

Google Glass suffered from this problem too, IMO.

~~~
Zak
I think the bigger problem with both is that they're tech demos rather than
products.

I got to demo Google Glass at a tech meetup once. It wasn't the first release,
so there had been time to work bugs out. It rapidly overheated after taking,
and looking at a couple pictures, and the battery life was abysmal. It
demonstrated several capabilities that will probably be included in useful
products in the future, but it was essentially unusable.

I bet in a decade or so, smart glasses will take off. As soon as they're
actually useful, the social resistance to them will get worn down.

------
calbear81
I think what would be helpful is some type of visual indicator on the buds
(maybe a pulsing charging indicator) to express that the translation service
is speaking so that the other party can see that you’re occupied with
listening to the translation.

------
amelius
Why does everything that Google designs look like it's made for pre-schoolers?

Just type into Google images: "Google design" and "Apple design" and let
yourself be shocked by the difference.

~~~
joshuamorton
What, excluding the google doodles, appear to be made for preschoolers, and
why?

Apple's (industrial) design is, if I used just two words, flat and alien.
Apple's UIs and product logos are more colorful, but their physical products
are almost without fail white or brushed aluminum, and foreboding.

Google uses color in its software, but if you take a look at google's physical
products ("Google Home", "Google Pixel phone", etc.), you'll note that they're
less colorful than their logos and software.

Curious what makes you think "preschoolers"?

------
workthrowaway27
From the article: "It is worse that Germans possess an inherent distrust of
Silicon Valley firms so asking them to speak into a phone while you’re wearing
earphones is an invitation for abuse."

Is this true? I've never been to Germany and don't know many Germans, but this
seems surprising to me.

~~~
username223
I wouldn't be surprised: a lot of Germans used to be East Germans, and the
Stasi were pretty thorough in their surveillance. EDIT: Watch "The Lives of
Others" when you get a chance. It's a great movie about relating to the
subject.

------
ashwinaj
Silicon valley arrogance?

If you don't like it, rightly criticize it (with the caveat that it's your
opinion or state facts) and don't use it. I don't understand the silicon
valley bashing; if you are so smart why don't you build something better?

------
659087
They will change the world, just not in the same way Google's PRopaganda team
would have you believe.

The main change will be that Google gets to record and analyze even more of
the world's private interactions than they do now.

------
VikingCoder
"the translation service needs internet connectivity to work"

I don't believe that's true. I think you can download a language set. Am I
wrong?

~~~
peterwwillis
Google doesn't do voice to text on the phone, they use an online service. It
would take a ginormous corpus of trained data and cpu to quickly process most
of the ways people pronounce even one language.

Their conversational translation is voice based because typing back and forth
on the phone takes too long. It works wonderfully when there is internet, but
you're screwed if you're traveling without a data plan. Then you're forced to
"learn a language" or "use hand signals" or "write things down" like some 20th
century chump.

------
chuckgreenman
This seems like a bit of an over reaction. Google has to talk up Pixel Buds,
they are a couple months behind apple's ear pods.

Frankly I like the form factor better than the ear pods, because they actually
look like headphones. I'm not sure the gestures are all that big of a deal,
give it a couple more months and the software will become finer tuned and
people will adjust.

------
lucozade
Seem like a pretty good idea for when you want to listen to a translation.
They're just not appropriate for conversations.

Presumably the approach that the author has discovered is good for a
conversation is still available?

------
rch
These will be really useful for group conversations. I'd still use the phone
for one-on-one interaction, but ear buds make perfect sense if you are mostly
following along and only speaking occasionally.

------
hummel
I really need someone to design a stand-alone pixelbud for hearing aids, speak
translation. I really need it, and I'm willing to invest in anyone doing that.

~~~
iliasku
doppler labs tried to do that and they 've shut down
([https://hereplus.me/](https://hereplus.me/))

------
zitterbewegung
I’m more interested if they will be profitable. If they arent maybe I can hack
together something with this and failed Snapchat glasses.

------
npsimons
> Sorry, you need to enable JavaScript to visit this website.

C-w

------
exabrial
Should have included.... a headphone jack. A cheap feature that makes an
otherwise incredible phone inaccessible to a large customer base.

------
ineedasername
Well, probably they won't change the world. But the author's complaints sound
like only that: complaining. Specifically, complaining in the vein of:

 _but it 's not PERFECT!_

or

 _I prefer something else ::pouty face::_

All of this from their own singular experience, where we are supposed to take
their initial example, using a phone to translate with a taxi driver in China,
as vastly superior. But we have only the author's POV for that: the taxi
driver may have thought it just as ridiculous as the author feels the buds to
be. Or maybe the driver loved it too, but that's the point: we don't know, and
neither does the author, but the author is generalizing from these limited
experiences to everything, and we're supposed to go along for the ride.

This doesn't even get to the specifics: The crux is that the author dislikes
that the translation is in-ear. There's other minor complaints, but that's the
heart of his rant. A bit overblown: Translation at the UN itself is "in ear",
where the members decide which of six official languages to listen to on their
headphones. Not that we should hold up any single example as the ideal: We
shouldn't. Different mechanisms may work best in different circumstances.
That's the problem with this take-down of buds: It is sweeping and
generalized, and supremely self-centered in its outlook for what all &
everyone else should appreciate.

