Even though it’s not a “real” holiday, brands spend a lot of time and effort crafting the perfect April Fool’s Day gag to fool their customers or at the bare minimum, make them laugh when they realize it’s not real. Google has a lot of brands under its name and so every time April 1 rolls around, you can expect most of them to have their own outrageous enough jokes to amuse people. This year Maps had Waldo, Google Israel had hummus, Gboard has a physical handwriting keyboard, Files Go has a Bad Joke Detector, and Chromebook had renewable charging.
The Google Maps gag was probably the most fun, as you actually saw it in action on your app. Users started seeing Waldo waving from their app screen and if you wanted to find him, just press on that waving icon and you’ll be transported to various places around the world in the iconic Where’s Waldo type of art. Now if you weren’t really looking for directions, it would be a fun way of using Maps as a Waldo-finding game. But if you were actually looking for how to go somewhere, then this gag would be sort of distracting and maybe annoying.
Google even had some localized gags, with their Israel office coming up with a Hummus Taste API which would supposedly match your taste for hummus with the different kinds of hummus around the country. They created a 2 minute video explaining how they were able to create this and if you didn’t know any better, you might be wondering if it’s true. Google Japan meanwhile came out with a physical handwriting version of the Gboard virtual keyboard where you swipe the shapes of letters and then uses AI to match your writing with the correct letters.
Files Go is now coming after your corny jokes with the Bad Jokes Detector. It will supposedly scan your phone using custom-built deep neural network and then automatically delete all the bad jokes to free up more space on your device. If you have a Chromebook meanwhile, you will now be able to charge your laptop with wind power, solar power, and the best one, compost power. Found any other Google April Fools’ jokes out there?
