Google’s I/O this year also saw the unveiling of its new service called Google Assistant, which is supposedly the company’s proper answer to Apple’s Siri, as well as Google Home, its take on Amazon’s Echo (which Google even credited for bringing excitement to this space).
Google Assistant
Now that mobile has indeed become the first screen, users would want their devices to be able to handle the vast amounts of data that users have to deal with on a daily basis. The years spent working with Now and Knowledge Graph has helped Google to come out with a greatly improved version that it now calls Google Assistant. Although arriving late to the scene, Google’s experience in machine learning and artificial intelligence has allowed it to make advances in natural language processing, voice recognition, and real-time translation to a point where it can start offering the kinds of services that the Google Assistant is now capable of.
Everything from alerts about a pandemic or virus infections, or about upcoming schedules, flights, booking a dinner reservation, buying movie tickets, a bite before the show, and even navigating to the said cinema/show can now be done with a little help from Google’s little Assistant.
It is powerful enough to be able to process images too and will be able to provide an accurate response for a query based on an image that was just shared. Users will even be able to take a picture of a sign in one of the supported languages and get it translated into another (this feature in particular came from one of Google’s earlier purchases).
Google Assistant has also been designed to be conversational and as with the natural language approach taken from last year’s I/O, it can also associate a follow up query to the topic that is currently being discussed.
The experience of using Assistant has been described as ambient and seamless. As such, it is expected to appear in many other devices and services that users will be engaging with in their daily lives. For starters, Assistant will be making an appearance soon in the upcoming Allo and Duo apps (probably even to a certain extent in the Spaces app as well in the near future), and it will be available too in Google Home.
Google Home
Google Home is the first hardware to leverage Google Assistant to bring voice-activated smart action to ordinary homes. Primarily a speaker with Google Cast support, Google Home can help provide users with entertainment such as video playback on Chromecast, as well as multi-room audio experience with music streaming apps such as Spotify and TuneIn Radio. All of which can now be activated with just a voice command. Home’s far-field microphones are said to be able to pick up voice commands from across a room, and claimed to be much better at it than Amazon’s Echo.
Users will also be able to use Google Home for search, queries about items on their calendars, turn on or off ‘connected’ household lights or other appliances, and very much access all the services that Google Assistant will be able to provide.
Google Home is also said to be already compatible with the Nest Learning Thermostat; which is part of Google’s range of household connected devices. It’s only a matter of time then before Google Home starts to gel with the others in the lineup. What still doesn’t make sense though was Google’s decision of not releasing an updated OnHub with the voice-activated search and Google Assistant baked in. Perhaps it’s one of the things to expect when Google Home gets released later this year.
With increased dependence on connected devices and the spread of IoT (internet of things), it’s only natural that Google would want to expand its reach deeper into this network by injecting itself into as many related devices and services as possible. Google’s vast array of server farms and its deep neural network definitely has a hand in this advancements and it’ll be interesting to see what else it’ll be able to do in the future.
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