An obvious reaction to Amazon’s Echo, which is a cylindrical connected smart-mic-and-speaker, powered by the retail giant’s Alexa AI, Google Home will be Google’s standalone version.
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For Google Home, the Google Assistant merges with Chromecast and smart home devices to control televisions, thermostats and other products.
Retail giant Amazon, which first launched its own wireless, voice controlled device in late 2014, was credited with “creating excitement in this space”, but Google reckons it’s got a victor thanks to its own expertise in voice recognition, by way of Google Voice Search and multiplatform app Google Now. First – Google Assistant will be everywhere across all devices and services and will be the lynch pin that keeps the experience consistent no matter where the user is or what he is doing. The new product is called Google Home and it works in conjunction with another new “virtual product” called Google Assistant that listens and answers your questions.
The new platform will serve as a proofing ground for VR content Google says, and contains a list of specifications Google believes virtual reality product should meet.
According to CEO Sundar Pichai, Google is not as far behind in the home assistant market as everyone seems to think.
OK, Google, I admit, there are things you do better than Apple – Google Maps, for instance, and recently, Google keyboard. That’s where the Google Home (previously codenamed Chirp) comes in. We got a glimpse at some changes coming to Android N, and learned that Google can’t quite figure out a name for the platform, which is honestly pretty amusing (and great). Pichai said that Google Assistant was a way to get tasks done in real time or search for what you need to know.
Erik Kay, engineering director at Google, introducing Allo and Duo on stage during the Google I/O 2016 developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 18, 2016. So as good as Echo is, it’s going to have a hard time competing with Home, for the simple reason that Google’s secret weapon over Amazon is just being Google.
While consumers can put the device in multiple rooms, the Home will not be able to support multiple Google accounts initially, but the company is working to fix that. Amazon Echo, consider your days numbered… We’ve got you covered on privacy; just like Apple, our new messaging service is getting end-to-end encryption. It was greeted with enthusiasm with the audience at Google I/O and in his closing remarks Mario Queiroz hinted that there would be a lot more to share with the developer community about how to begin to integrate with the Google assistant.
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Google is now part of a larger holding company known as Alphabet Inc.
