Last week in San Fransisco Google introduced their new Google Home. The product will be available for pre-order on Tuesday and on November 4 they will be in stores, the device costs 129 dollars.
Google Home is a wi-fi speaker which also works as a smartphone control centre and an assistant, it’s controlled by voice commands. You can use Home to play music, get answers to easily-answered questions, set timers and control smart lighting fixtures. It’s similar to the Amazon Echo which was released in 2015.
When Google saw the Amazon Echo being so succesful (over 3 million sold) they must’ve seen it as a great threat. Being able to quickly answer questions has been Google’s bread and butter for years. So it’s pretty obvious for Google to compete with Amazon is this market. Google also has a lot of services like Calender and Maps for example which are connected to the Home, and count as a big advantage for Google.
There are some differences between the Home and the Echo. First of all the Home recognizes follow-up questions. For example when you ask Home “who is Nicolas Cage?” you can follow it up by asking “What movies has he been in?” and get a response, you can’t ask Echo this question. The Google Home can also share information with your smartphone and other Google devices like the chromecast.
Do I believe Google will immediatly surpass Amazon in the smart speaker market? No. Amazon has a pretty big headstart and they currently have 400 open positions at their Echo department which indicates that they’re still doing pretty well. But I do believe that Google has the ability to be a big player in this market. As I mentioned earlier, answering questions quickly has been their bread and butter and they’ve got a lot of services which make the Home very usable.
http://www.pcmag.com/article/348496/google-home-vs-amazon-echo-which-one-should-rule-your-smar
http://variety.com/2016/digital/news/google-home-introduction-1201877695/
Google Home is going to be a way better device than the Amazon Echo ever can be. Although they didn’t invent something new, they improved an existing product by putting the full Google Services inside it. With Google’s new AI algorithms it is going to give you a way smoother experience than Amazon echo will ever give you. At 129$ it is also cheaper than the $179 Echo.
The Echo seemed great when Amazon introduced it, but now Google has improved it.
Hey there! Nice article! I agree that Google may have an advantage in the sense that they understand the search of people in context after doing that for so long as you already mentioned. On the other hand Alexa has connection to so many other things too – audiobooks, shopping, games even. So the rivalry is pretty intense. I also found this article http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/09/why-google-assistant-is-smarter-than-alexa-for-now/ on VentureBeat. The author says that Google is definitely outperforming Amazon in this case.
Hi and thank you for writing this post. Very interesting information about both products and about the advantages Google Home will offer over Amazon Echo. I feel however about this smart speaker market the same way I feel about the smart watch market. It only serves a small niche and offers too little advantages to become a mainstream product. I am not sure I could be bothered to use this voice-search function, for instance, now that mobile search has become so quick and accurate. We all know the struggles with voice recognition.
Also, and perhaps more importantly, I think the privacy concerns are enormous. One could argue that they are comparable to the privacy issues of smart TV’s and smartphones, but this does take it one step further in my opinion, because it, by design, needs to constantly ‘listen’ in order to respond to the ‘wake word’, and needs a constant internet connection in order to deliver its service. Not a relaxing idea.
For those reasons I don’t think this smart speaker market will be ‘here to stay’. Definitely interesting to see what will happen!