Google’s home appliance has just been announced, meet Google Home. It’s their competitor to Amazon Echo which received a shout out during the I/O keynote. Google Home will be available later this year.
This hardware product will listen for your commands and return queries from the web. Better than that, Google Home integrates with IoT devices. In the demo, Google showed an experience where you can request Home to play music, then play music in all rooms (to wake the kids). This played the audio using connected speakers and when that still didn’t get the son out of bed, he asked to turn the lights on and the connected light turns on.
IoT has always been clumsy for the average person and if Google Home can solve the connection and control problems associated with IoT devices from a range of manufacturers, this really could be a big deal.
Naturally Google products and services work together, so the earlier announcement of context-aware help, using Google Assistant is build right into Google Home.
Possibly the most exciting experience Google promoted was when the son asked “how many stars in the galaxy?”, then “show me on the TV” and the search became a YouTube video that plays on the TV.
Google says they wanted to announce Home now so developers could work with them to enable more connected services. They then proceeded to talk through a slide of partners like Uber, so you could book a ride with a quick voice request, or buy something online from connected stores.
Google also explained they’ve seen a 25% improvement in voice searching thanks to a change in the way they train their voice algorithms. Google Now is widely considered as the best voice assistant on our phones, but when you’re making natural language voice requests from across the room, they needed to improve. By training the algorithms with background noise, they achieved the 25% gain in accuracy.
Are you ready to start talking to your home?