I don't think Google Corporate had any idea this was going on and that way more people were interested in it than normal and many were reporters and investors. It had a feel like a local Google dev group meeting which is informal. I stopped using Google Search months ago because it was totally unusable. For some things it's still good and I use search within Google Maps often.

I think this will make voice-based UI viable (finally!) which is great. It's going to definitely eat into traditional Google ad revenue since clicking around and "impressions" are going to go way down.