While Amazon and their Echo speaker have ruled the roost for the last couple of years in the smart home assistant space, a new player has entered the match in the form of Google Home, which Google announced a couple of weeks back during their annual I/O developer conference. Google Home, which is technically less functional than the Amazon Echo in terms of features, will be every bit as good and better than the Amazon Echo in the long run according to Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, with some functions, like the natural conversation that will come from interacting with Google Home, already being better than Alexa due to the nature of Google Assistant which is the driving force behind Google Home.
Speaking today at the Code Conference, Sundar Pichai spoke out about quite a few different topics, but one in particular, Google Home, will be of specific interest to those who may be considering the product for their own home once it launches later this year. When asked why he thought Google could “do the Google Home thing better than Amazon,” Pichai replied by drawing attention to the fact that they plan for Home to be a much more conversational piece of technology that has a more diverse dialogue than Echo and its Alexa software. Google’s aim will be to build up Home’s conversational attributes over the long term, specifically noting the next five to ten years as an example. While this is just an example, it does point out that Google certainly plans for Home to be a long term product that will be around for at least a decade as Google wants it to have a “true conversational understanding,” something which will take some time to construct.
Building on that, Pichai states that they have a lot of work ahead of them in terms of reaching their goals for Home and that they are only at their one percent stage in terms of what the product will be able to do. Google’s visions are always grand in scale, and while the smart home assistant may not be an innovation for Google, that does not mean that Home won’t have plenty to offer consumers. Google wants to help people “get things done” and Home is their outlet for such tasks. So while Amazon’s Echo may be able to do things like order you a pizza and request your next Uber ride, Google Home will be able to, eventually, hold a conversation with you, delivering natural responses that seem like you’re having a conversation with another person, right down to the way the voice sounding more human. Google surely has plans for Google Home to be more functional in terms of task completion too, but its true uniqueness will be in the form of its dialogue and conversation attributes.