Alexa this, Echo that. That was yesterdays news with Amazon opening sales for a localised Echo to Australians. Today Google has hit back revealing some interesting stats for the Google Home.
Prior to Christmas last year Google had a big push into the marketplace with their Google Home and Google Home Mini and the figures reflected this. In the month of December the number of Australians regularly using Google Home and Google Home Mini “nearly tripled”.
Not only are more people using Google Homes but the sales are growing. Since the Google Home Mini started shipping in October there has been a sale of a Google Home device nearly every second worldwide. The sales figure of Google devices for the home now stands at “tens of millions”.
Part of the reason for the explosion has not just been the attractive pricing of the devices but the increased functionality that has been added to them. Google, in their blog post, gave the example of the broadcast functionality and in their best Aussie slang gave the phrase to be used on Australia Day:
“Ok Google, broadcast sausage sangas are served!”
Google have done their best to localise Google Assistant to Australia as well, just as Amazon will have to do for Alexa. They say that Google Assistant “gets Aussies”.
There are local businesses supporting including news stations, sporting leagues, banking, retail, entertainment and transportation. There are apparently over a million Actions that Google Assistant is capable of performing including the control of over 1500 smart home devices from over 225 companies.
Google is promising to bring even more hands-free control to Aussies this year and we look forward to it. We would love them to publicise more of these localised Actions as I know my usage is limited to a lot less than fifty, let alone a million.
What are your favourite Actions to ask your Google Assistant to perform? Do you have it integrated with your smart home devices?
Annoyed me for years: Assistant & now Google Home don’t know about tides. “Hey Google, when’s high tide?” “Sorry I can’t help you with that”. (Rather than “The next High tide at Fort Dennsion will be at 10:08am and will be 1.6 metres.”). Surely that ought to be an obvious application for a small slice of Google’s vast computing power? Especially for Australia.
I am only just getting started with my Google Home, although Alexa currently has much wider integration with home automation stuff (most of which isn’t for sale in Australia) so Google is playing catch up, and not just in Australia.
They are currently 2 for$80 at the usual suspects.
Google Assistant doesn’t quite get Aussies yet, ask it “make coffee” and it reads back a result with fluid ounces instead of proper metric results, or try asking it “how many sheep in australia”, it returns the NZ result. Interestingly, google search was behind assistant and used to return the correct knowledge result, but now it also returns the NZ result
when they first drop the home mini down to 55 bucks it pretty much sold out everywhere around me i had to wait a week to get another one.