The product is called Stories, and it takes photos users upload and automatically packages them up into narratives.

Maybe that sounds easy, but that's because you're a human. Teaching a machine a sense of narrative and place isn't quite so easy, even using all of the information that Google knows about a user.

So, I spent time with the Google team that built Stories. I learned how they did it and began to consider what that says about computers' ability to understand the human world enough to help us live in it.

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The early prototypes look nothing like the finished product.

At first, Smarr and Lider created something that looked more like a personal report card, a bunch of data compiled like the nerd-famous "annual reports" produced by one-time Facebook designer Nicholas Fenton. A May 2012 design mockup features Lider's check-ins and hiking stats, interactions with people, and musical choices. It's a fairly comprehensive and detailed set of information about a person, artfully chosen and arranged. The idea was to create something like a Facebook News Feed, only for a single person: an algorithmic distillation of your own personal news.

But that was just a mockup. When they began to see what they could actually create with all of Google's data about its users and all its processing might, they discovered something: "Our history is noisy and incomplete," Smarr said. At the same time, they were honing their concept. And they kept coming back to photographs.

Lider ran user group studies, asking people to talk about each of the last ten photographs that they took. Why'd they take it? Who was it for?

There were three broad categories. The first was obvious: they took the photograph for someone. The second category makes sense, too: people used photographs for memory augmentation, to remember a beer they'd liked or a place they wanted to come back to. The third category, though, was "documentation of adventures." And when they asked people how often they actually used the pictures that they took, "recorded adventures had the lowest percentage of people acting upon their intentions," Lider said.

The first two categories have obvious apps and services associated with them. Every messaging app in the world helps people send pictures they've taken for someone. And Evernote, among others, exists to help people remember things.

But adventure recording? That didn't have an App Store-leading app. In fact, people tended to blame themselves for not using those photographs they'd taken. They'd say they were lazy for not getting the photos to friends or into a form that they themselves could enjoy.

Smarr, Lider, and Ng began to sense an opportunity. Lider ran more user tests. He had people come in and play with print outs of photographs.

He'd literally ask them to lay them out on a table. Most people organized the images left to right in a chronological strip. They clustered photos from the same place together, and even place an "establishing shot" of that place at the beginning of each location section.