Google Home: Your Digital Assistant At Home!
Personal assistants are very popular tools to help you get organized and search for things quickly through voice commands. Many digital personal assistants are found in mobile devices such as Siri for Apple devices, Google Now for Android devices and Microsoft's Cortana. Looks like digital assistants are moving from mobile devices to your home! In this article, we are shedding light on this new technology.
About a year and half ago, Amazon has released an intelligent speaker called "Echo". It can receive voice commands from anywhere in your home and act upon them. Lately, Google has entered the competition with its new speaker called "Google Home". Google Home is a Wi-Fi speaker, set with microphones that can be used for many purposes at your home.
Google Home helps you carry on everyday tasks, such as setting the alarm, reviewing and editing your schedule, making calls and many more. All these tasks can be done through issuing voice commands from anywhere across the room. Google Home is in always-listening mode to receive your voice commands at once. Google connects your smart home system easily. Having a smart home system, you can turn lights on and off, get temperature feedback and many other things by employing the trending Internet of Things technology.
Surely, you can also use it for entertainment. You can ask Google Home to play a song or increase volume. Google Home connects to the cloud to stream your music with the highest quality. You can stream videos as well, just tell Google Home to play your favorite TV program for example and it will appear on your screen. Another special feature in Google Home is that you can use it to control other speakers in your home. That would not require complex setup.
Finally, you can search anything on Google using Google Home. You can ask about a certain historical fact or the score of a game you missed. You can basically ask about anything you would search on the traditional Google search engine. The most interesting thing here is that Google Home doesn't only know about general knowledge, but it also keeps learning about you and your personal habits. This is done through modern artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. However, that may introduce privacy issue but Google says that learning will only happen under your permission.
Google Home will be available for consumers later this year. However, no pricing has been announced yet. Google Home is now considered the only available competitor to Amazon's Echo. This competition is very useful to this new market and it looks like that we are going to get more intelligent devices like these in the near future.