MEET HOME, GOOGLE’S ANSWER TO AMAZON ECHO
Device should be available later this year at an as-of-yet-disclosed price
Google officially entered the voice-activated speaker race Wednesday with Google Home.
The standalone device will compete directly with Amazon’s popular Echo and should be available to consumers later this year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced at the search company’s annual developers conference, Google I/O.
The move had been anticipated as Google looks to put its mark on a coming age of artificial intelligence in which machines learn to interpret and answer human queries by leveraging the speed and scope of Big Data and cloud computing.
Though smartphones still hold a lock on human-computing interactions, the surprise hit of Amazon’s Echo speaker has energized a new category: speakers run by digital assistants connected to a tech giant’s app and content ecosystem. Google Home project lead Mario Queiroz held the device in his palm, revealing a design that was shorter and wider than Amazon’s cylindrical Echo, which is powered by Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa. Microsoft also has its own personal assistant, Cortana, but as yet no at-home device.
Google Home will use its new Google assistant, which leverages Google’s search and the contextual queries it has been developing with a decade of research into artificial intelligence. It will be able to play music, complete a range of tasks and answer questions that one would ask of Google search. Google did not reveal a price.
“Google’s entry (in this market) validates the space and its vision to sit between the consumers and their favorite brands,” Forrester analyst Julie Ask says. “However, Google also failed to offer answers to questions such as a firm date on availability, price or access to the service, (which makes one wonder) how open will access be for brands who want to engage their consumers on Google Home.”
A video screened during the unveiling of Home showcased a morning routine in which a woman checks on her flight, changes a dinner reservation and sends a text to a friend, while her husband asks the device to turn lights on and children pose homework-related questions.
Ask says that while entertaining, such use-cases for Home don’t yet showcase the “true breakthrough experiences that bots fueled by artificial intelligence and machine learning ” promise to provide. But, she adds, Google “is on a journey, and they have time ( because) consumers won’t expect these experiences for another two or three years.”
Pichai told the 7,000 developers present at Shoreline Amphitheater that the company was working hard on natural language processing, giving examples of how Google’s search engine can understand context. Ask about movies playing, and Google will surface nearby theaters. “Let’s go with Jungle Book,” Pichai said, and the assistant followed up by purchasing tickets and sending them to his digital wallet.
“Every conversation is different, and we’re working hard to do this for billions of users around the world,” he said. “It’s an ambient experience.”