While the report lacks a whole lot of finer details, it does say that Portal will be pitched as a way for friends and family to remain connected instead of the industry standard — voice assistant with a screen. It will, though, still support voice commands. However, it’s unclear right now what exactly it will be capable of doing. Portal will feature a wide-angle lens for video chats which will come integrated with the social network’s facial recognition technology. This will essentially enable it to associate faces in the window with Facebook accounts which could be used to perhaps pull up their recent profile updates. In addition to that, Portal will allow users to stream music and videos through a bunch of services such as Spotify and Netflix. In other news, Google at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show announced that it’s bringing Assistant to smart displays. The search engine giant has already partnered with a series of hardware makers including Lenovo, JBL, and a few others.
