Google Home Hub off to good start
Tiny video speaker takes on Echo Show
Despite a few flaws, it has major potential.
MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. – Imagine if we could call out to our living room TV to access a show or movie, get cooking directions, watch YouTube clips on demand, have it double as a digital photo frame, look up anything in the world, make phone calls and run your home automation system.
How cool would that be? That’s the promise of Google’s new Home Hub, a $149 talking speaker that is taking on Amazon’s $229 Echo Show in what’s expected to be one of the biggest marketing battles of the holidays. It’s the next wave in voice computing, post Alexa and Google Home.
The good stuff
The product, which went on sale Monday, is the most affordable of the talking video speakers, at $149, next to $229 for the new second-generation Echo Show. Facebook will have its talking speaker, the Portal, out for the holidays in midNovember, starting at $199. The Hub is also the smallest of the three, with a 7-inch screen, compared to 10 inches for the Show and entry-level Portal.
I think of the Hub as an alternative to the TV because, yes, you can watch live TV on it via YouTube TV, Google’s $40 monthly cable alternative, as well as endless videos, listen to music and do silly things, such as have Hub sing “Happy Birthday” to you, with visuals, or have celebrities such as MC Hammer explain the origin of their name.
I own an Amazon smart TV, and, compared to the Hub, it’s just not as smart. Voice com- mands work well, though not as seamlessly as with the Hub; it isn’t natively hands free; and while you can run a photo slideshow, it isn’t with the smarts of the Google device.
What could be better
The Hub feels tiny. It’s a little bigger than a smartphone and a good deal smaller than an iPad. And that’s not the only flaw. First, as with any connected speaker, you have to get your directions right on. I had to play around with several phrases until I got them right.
A surprise is that when asked for a recipe, Google responds with a list of clips, like Apple’s Siri saying, “Here’s what I found on the web.” The trick, readers, is you have to announce “select” to choose from clip 1, 2 or 3.
Getting it to call up specific YouTube clips is a work in progress. Many times it works as advertised. (“Hey, Google, play the ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ video by Queen on YouTube.”) Notice you have to say the word “video;” otherwise, the Hub will play audio of the song on YouTube Music, YouTube’s fledgling music service.
Other times, no amount of word changes could get Hub to play on command a recent monologue by late night TV comics Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Fallon. Instead, it went to clips of guests talking to the hosts.
The trick: You have to re- quest the clip exactly as it was uploaded, which will require you to look it up on your phone, tablet or computer first. Instead of asking for the monologue, ask to “Play the California Guide to Medicinal Marijuana Card in Brooklyn by Jimmy Kimmel Live on YouTube,” or “Play `Here’s why White Supremacists are Chugging Milk’ by Late Show with Stephen Colbert video on YouTube.”
Alternatively, you could say, “Play me the latest Jimmy Kimmel Live videos on YouTube,” and you’ll get a visual selection of the last uploaded clips. You probably won’t want to ask to play the comedy clips because they’re a mouthful, so instead just use your finger to select them and start playback.
Shopping is not as robust as anything from Amazon’s shop, routing us to retail partners.
The verdict
The Hub has so much going for it, we can excuse the initial growing pains. This is the ground floor of the next generation of video viewing, and it’s cool to be on the ground floor. If we bought the unit just as a digital photo frame for viewing our pictures from the massive Google Photos collection, it would be worth it. We spent $100 to $200 10 years ago on photo frames that were nowhere near as powerful.
Now if we could just say, “Hey, Google, how about a larger version” and make it happen.