Google Home was announced in May 2016 at Google I/O and yesterday the company revealed more details about it at Made by Google hardware event.
Google Home is an artificial intelligence voice assistant that is able to answer questions and accomplish common tasks such us setting alarms, playing a song and sending messages. The device uses far- field voice recognition and it is activated when it hears the words “Ok Google” being said. You can then ask random questions (like the ones you used to type into Google), ask Home to add a note to your calendar and other reminders, or reply to unread messages and emails.
If you own smart devices made by Nest, Samsung or Philips, you can use Home to set the heating or adjust lighting and if you have a Chromecast, you can now control your TV with your new assistant. Netflix integration is coming soon and Google demonstrated this on stage by saying “Ok Google, play Stranger Things on Netflix”.
If you are in the US and can’t wait for in-store availability, you can now pre-order it online for $129. However, the company hasn’t announced yet when it will be coming to the UK.
Although these are exciting news for Google, AI home-based assistants were launched some years ago. In fact, analysts estimate that Amazon has sold more than 3 million Echo units since their release in 2004.
So how does Google intend to lead the market when Amazon is already at the forefront?
First of all, since Google wasn’t able to differentiate its product it tries to achieve cost leadership by selling more products in a lower price (Echo costs $179). We all know that the company has distribution skills and marketing expertise that can contribute significantly to this effort. Secondly, it is very important for these smart devices to operate as a platform for third- party services and devices and Google is an expert on creating an ecosystem. Finally, Google has the artificial intelligence skills to beat Amazon. It has an undoubtable lead on natural language processing, with one-fifth of US searches on Android being done using voice.
Competition will be fierce and new players might also enter the market, but as Google CEO Sundar Pichai said “all credit to Amazon for creating interest in this space”.
Sources:
https://madeby.google.com/home/
http://www.techradar.com/news/digital-home/google-home-release-date-news-and-features-1321794
Shapiro, C., and Varian, H. 1998. Pricing Information. In Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press
http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/4/13160028/google-home-vs-amazon-echo-first-click
http://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2016/10/04/google-home-vs-amazon-echo/#46f227165963
Hi Tania,
thank you for your interesting post on this subject.
I share your view, that Google is in a good position to overtake Amazon in this market section.
I actually weight your third point the strongest. With Google announcing Google Assistant yesterday as well, they will feature their AI assistant even more prominently within the Android OS. Together with their incredible amount of data on search queries their collected over the years it will be hard for any other company to keep up with their expertise on conversation based AI.
There is one thing in your blog post that confused me though. You are stating, that Amazon Echo was already released in 2004. To my knowledge is was only introduced around a year ago.
Hello Moritz,
regarding to your question, Amazon Echo was released in November 2004, but it was only available to Amazon Prime and invited members. It became widely available in the US in June 2015 and it came to the UK last week.
I totally agree with your comment about Google Assistant, which seems to be much smarter than Amazon’s Alexa. The assistant contains a lot of knowledge about the world and it can identify the correct track when you ask it to “Play the Shakira song from Zootopia”, while Alexa can’t. Moreover, there are several improvements in AI and machine learning which made “Google Assistant conversational”. Indeed, it can understand what you mean when you ask “What is playing tonight” and after suggesting you a few titles, if you say “We are planning on bringing the kids” it will show you family- friendly films.