Welcome to If Then, the show about how technology is changing our lives and our future.

I'm Will Arreamus.

And I'm April Glazer.

Hey, everybody, welcome to If Then.

We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America.

We are recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, January 9th, and we are here at CES in Las Vegas, formerly the Consumer Electronics Show.

It's the huge trade show put on by the Consumer Technology Association.

On today's show, we'll be talking about everything we've seen so far and are writing about at CES.

Oh, God, I hope we're not talking about.

I hope we're not talking about everything we've seen.

Okay, well, some of the things we've seen.

It's a sprawling schmooze fest here, a real like kind of marketing product showcase extravaganza. There are about 200,000 people descended here on the city of

Las Vegas to come to the event. It stretches across 11 massive venues. It's hard to even

describe how big this is. Yeah, it's insane and unmanageable. And everybody comes here and sort of

hates it, but we come anyway because everybody's here. Yeah, and you just, you learn a lot about what's going to happen. I mean, there's been a lot unveiled here in the past that really was consequential and that kind of happens every year, right, Will? Yeah, that's right. And sometimes it's hard to tell in the moment what the consequential thing is. We're going to take a shot at it. And on today's show, we're going to talk about a few things in particular. We'll talk about the big battle here between Amazon's Alexa and the Google Assistant. We'll talk about self-driving cars, cybersecurity and intel's problems, and robots, all kinds of robots, robots that keep your home secure, do your laundry, entertain your kids, launch pet treats, six feet in the air for your dogs to catch. We'll probably talk about a bunch of other random crap, too. So I actually want to start out with the fact that we have a new guest here at CES, somebody that, or rather a company that hasn't been here before, and that is Google, right, Will? Yeah, and I think that's kind of a big deal, because one of the knocks on CES for several years now has been that Apple always skips it, and Apple has been the biggest company in technology for a long time. Or the biggest company in the world, actually. That's right, the biggest company in anything. But not only that, but because it's mostly a gadget show or has been mostly a gadget show, then the big internet companies skip it too. And so, you know, in this decade, the biggest tech companies, besides Apple, are Google and Facebook, and they are software, not hardware. And so they don't come either. And so all the cool stuff happening in tech isn't happening here. That's beginning to change. Well, I would disagree. I would say a lot of the cool stuff in tech is happening here. It's just that the big kind of juggernauts decided that they could skip it, and they kind of had their own product release launch schedule. But that's starting to change because Google is getting into the hardware space. Yeah, that's right. And so Google is trying to compete with Amazon's wildly popular Echo devices, and it has its line of the Google Home Smart Speaker, and now it has a Google Home Mini and a Google Home Max.

And it announced last night, actually, that it is taking on an interesting strategy.

It's going to partner with, like, every electronics company in the world to try to put Google Assistant on everything, right?

Like you're not just smart speakers, but there will be more smart speakers, but also smart

displays. So this is sort of like the Amazon Echo Show where you can actually look at a screen

and touch stuff on the screen in addition to talking to it. What else? What am I missing?

When you say partner with everything, what do you mean?

You mean like different companies to get kind of the Google AI assistant inside their devices?

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