To build the cutting-edge technologies that enable conversational understanding and image recognition, we often apply combinations of machine learning technologies such as deep neural networks and graph-based machine learning. However, the machine learning systems that power most of these applications run in the cloud and are computationally intensive and have significant memory requirements. What if you want machine intelligence to run on your personal phone or smartwatch, or on IoT devices, regardless of whether they are connected to the cloud?

Yesterday, we announced the launch of Android Wear 2.0, along with brand new wearable devices, that will run Google’s first entirely “on-device” ML technology for powering smart messaging. This on-device ML system, developed by the Expander research team, enables technologies like Smart Reply to be used for any application, including third-party messaging apps, without ever having to connect with the cloud…so now you can respond to incoming chat messages directly from your watch, with a tap.

The research behind this began last year while our team was developing the machine learning systems that enable conversational understanding capability in Allo and Inbox. The Android Wear team reached out to us and was interested to know whether it would be possible to deploy this Smart Reply technology directly onto a smart device. Because of the limited computing power and memory on smart devices, we quickly realized that it was not possible to do so. Our product manager, Patrick McGregor, realized that this presented a unique challenge and an opportunity for the Expander team to return to the drawing board to design a completely new, lightweight, machine learning architecture — not only to enable Smart Reply on Android Wear, but also to power a wealth of other on-device mobile applications. Together with Tom Rudick, Nathan Beach, and other colleagues from the Android Wear team, we set out to build the new system.

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