Google Home will compete with the Amazon Echo as a spiffy new smart speaker
Google announced its new voice-responsive home device on Wednesday, marking the company's entry into a market currently ruled by Amazon's Echo. Like the Echo, Google Home will be able to answer questions and carry out basic tasks, like calling an Uber or ordering a pizza.
"We want to have an ongoing, two-way conversation with our users," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the Google I/O conference.
According to Greg Kumparak of Techcrunch, what makes Google Home stand out is that the company is working to make the voice engine "more conversational." "You can say things like 'What's playing tonight?' get a list of movies, but then clarify with 'We want to bring the kids tonight' — and it’ll know how to contextually refine its answers," Kumparak wrote in his live blog of the conference.
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Kumparak added that, "You can book a car, order dinner, send flowers to mom — but you can also ask Google anything that you’d expect Google to know about: weather, movie times, and stuff from Wikipedia." Questions can even get pretty complicated, like "what was the U.S. population when NASA was established?" This is, after all, Google.
The Verge also notes that unlike the Echo, owning multiple Homes is seamless, allowing for consumers to put them in several rooms throughout a house. The Google Home will come out later this year, and for a yet-unspecified price.
But wait, there's more: Google also announced a new messaging app, Allo — keep up with all the news on Techcrunch's live blog, here.
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