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Nest CEO steps down as the company joins Google's home division
According to CNET, Nest has announced today that Marwan Fawaz will no longer be its CEO. As part of his departure, Nest will now be folded into Google's home and living room products team. In a joint interview with Fawaz, Rishi Chandra, vice president of product management for Google's home and living room products, said that the combination would make it easier for Google to integrate some of its machine learning technology and artificial intelligence into Nest products.
Google TV gets voice search and a quick guide to make content discovery easier than ever
Thought Google TV emptied its bag of tricks with that nifty new YouTube feature that lets folks shoot videos from their phones to their Googlefied TVs with a single tap? Think again, friend. GTV's far from a one-click pony, and today the platform's getting voice search and a new quick guide to make finding your favorite shows, movies and videos a more painless experience. Voice search allows users to now access channels and apps by simply speaking their names into either a Magic Remote or Android phone with the GTV remote app -- it's rolling out to folks with LG Google TVs this week, while other GTV hardware should get the update in the coming months. Searching by show titles and movie genres is supported, and it returns results from YouTube, live TV, Netflix and more. Plus, the system can also answer natural language queries with results from the web, too.%Gallery-170870% In addition to voice search, GTV has renamed its TV & Movies application and added a quick guide version of the app to let folks find other video content without having to navigate away from what they're watching. Called PrimeTime, the quick guide is a less obtrusive means for finding shows, videos and movies. It still uses the suggestion engine to make recommendations based upon viewing habits, and, of course, the full PrimeTime app experience is still available. We got to chat with Google TV's Director of Product Management, Rishi Chandra, about the updates, so join us after the break to hear what he had to say.
The Engadget Interview: Google TV Product Manager Rishi Chandra at CES 2012 (video)
After launching its initial volley in late 2010, Google TV remained in a holding pattern hardware-wise while waiting for the massive upgrade to Honeycomb that would bring third party apps and an entirely new UI. Now Google TV 2.0 has arrived, and it's been followed by a slew of new product announcements. While Logitech has bowed out this time, new partners Vizio, LG and Samsung are joining Sony for round two, so we took a few minutes to chat with product manager Rishi Chandra about where the platform has been in the last year and a half, and where he sees it going in the future. Check out the video above to see what the team has learned from its users over the last year, and what the folks at Google think it will mean to simplify TV and internet video viewing.
