Pretty cool. I’ve been interested in Fuchsia for a while, from what I read about it last year it’s built from scratch to be a primarily search-based / speech prompted OS. Instead of a traditional “desktop” metaphor, they are trying to transition to a “story telling” / “conversation” metaphor using natural language.
The goal is to be the next step beyond the functionality of their google home devices which are currently limited to prompts like “Is it going to rain tomorrow?”, or “set a timer for 3 minutes”. They want to expand on that functionality to the point where you can eventually tell a phone or laptop “Hey Google, add a sepia filter to that picture I took of my dog yesterday, then add it to my Facebook wall.” or “Hey Google, open the survey results spreadsheet I just downloaded… plot a distribution graph of all the values in column A and mark each standard distribution”
If they can get the tech to work it has a tremendous potential. People who are not competent with current operating systems could become drastically more productive. This tech could potentially enable the illiterate to access information on the internet, and effectively use computers for the first time. If Fuchsia succeeds in advancing natural speech processing, computer vision, content recognition, IOT, and other fields of computer science to create a platform that is even a fraction as good as the tech in the movie Her (without consciousness) I think it could shake up the IT landscape as much as smartphones have in the last decade.
I’m not a Google fan, in fact, the thing that worries me about Fuchsia is all the potential I see in it. Google will try to use Fuchsia to further monopolize the internet. So much of the Internet’s infrastructure already relies on Google, and they will use any innovations to further entrench themselves. I don’t trust Google to dominate in IT for the public good.
At any rate, it’s all at least a couple years away. As far as I know there is a lot of R&D between where they are today and the ultimate vision for the product. For now, Google has only demonstrated they have a built-from-scratch working kernel that can run the same Nest-Hub software that Linux can run, but the next 10 years will likely be a wild ride for IT.
The way you describe it reminds me of JARVIS from the Iron Man movies
This could be so cool, only for the fact that its Google, it immediately gives me pause
Wish they would go back to their “Dont be evil” roots lol
Google will never be its old self again. It used to be that we could expect another grassroots organization to take the mantle. I don’t think that’s a thing anymore in this era of big tech. The industry has monopolized talent, vacuuming up everything before it has a chance to grow.
Important distinction: The base Fuchsia OS is open source, whatever’s running on the Nest devices aren’t.
And since Fuchsia is a microkernel they only have to keep the very small core open source and keep everything on top proprietary.
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