Google makes the right noises with its latest ‘smart’ speaker
Google has launched its Home, a smart speaker meant to control people's entire lives.
The little speaker features microphones that can listen out for what people say and send that up to Google. As such, it has access to everything that Google knows — information about the world, about its users and the ability to play media like music.
At its base, the system is a Wi-Fi connected speaker. That means that it can pull music through apps like Spotify or YouTube and play it out of speakers that the company says are as good as others on the market.
But because it has the Google Assistant built in, the company hopes that it can help people with their lives, too. It can pull information from Google's knowledge about the world — how far away somewhere is, for instance — but it can also use information about its owners that Google has, like whether they've got time to get there before their next appointment.
Google Home will be available for $ 129, the company said, and will be offering a free six month trial of YouTube Red. It will be available for pre-orders starting straight away in the US, and will be shipping on 4 November — it didn't say when it will be rolling out across the rest of the world.
The Home was unveiled at Google's hardware event, which also saw it show off its new Pixel phone and a soft virtual reality headset.
The company unveiled a series of different features that Home was built for. Those include music, using Google's own features like YouTube and its connection with the Chromecast streaming audio and video players.
But its most central feature is access to Google's entire knowledge graph — all of the information about the world that it has collected. The Home can be asked for information about people, more specific information like how to clean a spill, or how long it might take to get to a specific place.
Because it can pull all of the information that Google has, the company says that it can provide more information than other companies like Amazon's Echo or Apple's rumoured home technology of its own. THE INDEPENDENT