Google Home, the company’s answer to Amazon’s
Echo, made its official debut
at the Google I/O developer conference earlier this year. Since then,
we’ve heard very little about Google’s voice-activated personal
assistant. Today, at Google’s annual hardware event, the company finally
provided us with more details.
Google Home will cost $129 (with a free six-month trial of YouTube
red) and go on sale on Google’s online store today. It will ship on
November 4.
Google’s Mario Queiroz today argued that our homes are different from
other environments. So like the Echo, Google Home combines a wireless
speaker with a set of microphones that listen for your voice
commands. There is a mute button on the Home and four LEDs on top of the
device so you know when it’s listening to you; otherwise, you won’t
find any other physical buttons on it.
Because Google wants Home to be something you could easily put into
your living room, you can choose from bases in different colors that
will help you match the Home to the rest of your interior design (though
the overall design best lends itself to the living room of a
mid-century Eichler in Palo Alto). Google argues that it took its design
cues from wine bottles and candles and it will offer a total of seven
different bases for the Home.
What Google Home is really about, though, is the Google Assistant —
the next-gen conversational version of what we currently know as Google
Now. If the Google Assistant on Google Home is anything like the first
text-centric version of the service we’ve seen in Google Allo,
then it’ll offer users a mix of delight (when it gets things right) and
utter frustration (when it doesn’t). As Google’s new Allo chat app has
shown us, the Google Assistant often can’t answer your questions. On the
screen, that means Google can show you links, but on Home, it will read
out snippets from Google Search.
Google today stressed that the company wants to be able to
personalize its services to the point where we all get “our own Google.”
Home with the Google Assistant is clearly geared toward that.
A new Assistant feature, “My Day,” also gives you a morning update
with current weather, commute times and a summary of your schedule
(assuming you opt in).
It’s no secret that Google is relatively late to the game here. With
its line of Echo devices, Amazon has already cornered much of the early
adopter market for this kind of device. This early lead means that
Amazon’s Echo line also works with the vast majority of smart-home
gadgets, be those Nest thermostats or Philips Hue lights (Amazon is even
selling the Echo in bundles with those third-party devices).
Unsurprisingly, Google has partnered with Nest, Phillips, Samsung and
IFTTT to support their smart home devices. That’s not a lot of
partners, but IFTTT itself does support quite a few devices already and
Google can piggyback on that.
As for music, Google Home will feature built-in support for Google
Play Music, Spotify, Pandora and others. You can set up a default music
service, too, so you don’t always have to tell Google that you want to
play a song “on Spotify.” Google also noted that Home’s music search is
powered by Google, so it can understand relatively complex queries.
Music on Google Home will also support podcast listening and because
it’s a Cast device, you can stream music to it from any other
Cast-enabled device.
Home integrates directly with Google’s Chromecasts and Cast-enabled
TVs. For now, that mostly means watching YouTube videos, but Google says
it will soon support Netflix, too.
Over the last few years, Google mostly worked on creating protocols
for smart-home devices, and, with the acquisition of Nest, it signalled
its own intentions to become a major player in the market. Under Google,
though, Nest stagnated and Google, despite hits like the Chromecast and
launching what could’ve been the core of an Echo competitor with its
OnHub routers, seemed to lack focus in its offerings.
With Home, that tide may finally be turning. Google Home finally
offers the central living room-based hub for its products and like the
Echo, it’s relatively future-proof because its intelligence is in the
cloud. With its Cast protocol, Google now also has a way to tie the Home
to other devices, including its highly successful Chromecast dongles.
That means its hardware — and especially its microphones — has to
work really well, though, and we’ll have to spend some hands-on time
with the Home before we can draw any conclusions about it. Google argues
that its microphones are “best in class” and that the speakers will
deliver a full range with rich bass sounds.