Google Home lets you play music, get answers from Google, manage tasks, and control other devices, all with your voice.
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This Nov. 4, Google will start invading homes with the Google Home, the speaker to rival Amazon’s Echo Dot.
The original Echo was a device we could heartily recommend to anyone. Having more than one device doesn’t mean they will all respond when you say “Ok Google”. Google and Amazon have both gone for a tall, rounded design. It has been knocked around the internet for resembling an air freshener, but I love the look. Have an Echo in your kitchen, but want to use it your living room?
All these companies are chasing the smart-home market, which could grow to be a $71 billion global industry by 2018, up from $33 billion in 2013 and $25 billion in 2012, according to Juniper Research.
Analysts are expecting Google will announce more details, including price and availability, at today’s event. Even while you jam out to music, it can easily hear you from across the room, thanks to two omnidirectional microphones and neural beamforming. You may be about to find out.
Google Home also has a powerful new feature, “My Day”.
Google is also likely to begin selling a voice-activated “smart speaker” called Home, apparently modeled on Amazon’s Echo. His most recent job was leading device development teams at Amazon’s Lab126, including the Echo and Dash products, his LinkedIn profile says.
Through this integration, Blink customers can now use their voice to arm, disarm and receive information about their security system, including current system status as well as time and location of the last recorded motion clip. Using an Echo device in the home or office, Alexa users can start the vehicle, lock or unlock their doors, and check the range between charges, after providing a security code. But that’s it. You’re typically just answering questions to help Alexa better figure things out. The Echo unsurprisingly can stream from Amazon Prime Music, while Google will play content from Play Music and Google Cast. But there is one glaring issue.
At launch, Google announced, Home has partnered up with Nest, Samsung SmartThings, Philips Hue, and IFTTT (If This Then That).
However, Google has been clear that its long term plans stretch beyond smartphones, to more substantial standalone hardware in future. Assistant is context-aware, so conversation should be more natural and less like a stilted list of commands. The other person is left in the dark. Sure, they can still ask numerous questions and get answers, but the concept of Google Assistant being everyone’s own personal assistant is immediately broken.
“Essentially it’s a wide variety of ecosystems”, said Honeywell Connected Home design director Ted Booth. Users can even ask about the latest news with Google News on voice command. This stands in contrast to the packaging for Nexus phones, the largely obscure line of Android phones that Google has produced with manufacturer partners since 2010, which had the names of both manufacturers and Google on its packaging.
By contrast, the Google Home is a little more fancy. Perhaps that is too much of a stretch, though.
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Google also launched a new line of Pixel smartphones, which contain the same digital assistant as Home, meaning that in a flawless IoT world, you’d be able to tell that assistant in your phone to turn down the thermostat, turn up the lights, and fire up the TV while on your commute home. It has serious ground to make up, though, and had better be fast out of the gates come November.
