As expected Google have announced their in-home voice interaction device, the Google Home. Google Home will be a gateway to the Google Assistant allowing you to interact with Google’s new voice assistant.
The Google Home hardware is basically a small WiFi speaker, with features including a user-swappable base and soft LED notifications. It seems to be just as powerful as Amazon’s Echo, and then quite a bit more. For example, you can ask it to do things like:
- Answer search queries
- Set alarms
- Set Timers
- Manage todo lists
- Shopping lists
- Control home automation products, e.g. lights, Thermostats, Switches and of course Nest.
- Play music and entertainment
- Join a Chromecast multicast group for multi-room playback
- Stream video to your TV (with appropriate receiver e.g. Chromecast)
With future development of the Google Assistant platform, Google will be bringing features such as booking a car, ordering dinner or sending flowers to your mother – all with just your voice. Google home lets you ask anything about what you want to know, be that weather or facts from Wikipedia etc. Google is promising immediate accurate answers from Google every single time. It will learn about you – with your permission of course – learn about your life, retrieve your travel itinerary daily schedule, traffic on trip to work and more.
It’s early days for Google Home and Assistant – but they want to show you how they envision the Google Assistant coming to live at your home:
Google Home is expected to launch later this year, unfortunately, there were no indications of price or availability. In response to a question on availability from the Australian media contingent, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said:
Google Home will be launching in the US first, but it will be coming to Australia soon after. (our emphasis)
In the meantime, we’ll keep on the developments here and keep you posted. You can receive updates direct from Google too, by dropping by Home’s new home and registering for updates.
Are you excited for Google Home? Will you be putting on in your lounge room, office or bedroom? Let us know in the comments
