Google is moving into new product categories that push the boundaries of what search will mean to us in the future. Once a simple white box with colorful letters above, Google search has become a very real part of our every day lives, and as such is playing an increasingly more important role in our daily tasks. Here to assist you with that is Google Assistant, the new AI helper designed to interact with you in ways Google hasn’t done in the past. Assistant is clear competition to the likes of Amazon’s Alexa, and subsequently Google Home to Amazon’s Echo speaker. Whether or not it’s a worthy replacement at a lesser cost of $129, you’ll just have to find out in our review below.
With Google Home you’ll likely find yourself not even thinking about saying OK Google before you ask the little speaker to do things, and the new natural language and machine learning that Google has been working on for some time now really makes a huge difference in how Google Assistant interacts with your commands. This isn’t just responding to a handful of keywords and trying to pop out a response, Google Assistant is truly an intelligent AI algorithm that can talk back to you and speak words you simply didn’t think were possible from a machine. This new voice and speech dialect can be found on Google Now, but works best when it’s attached to Google Assistant as it was on the Google Pixel’s launch.
Google Home is designed to be placed in a specific room of your choosing, and works well with other Google Home units across your house, as well as other Google Cast ready devices. In fact you’ll be using the same app to interact with all of these products, and as a result the app has once again been renamed to Google Home, coming from its previous names of Chromecast, followed by Google Cast. This new rebranding shows that Google is working on integrating itself deeper into your life in personal ways it never was able to before, and it’s likely that Google Home will be the first time many will experience such interconnected technological harmony.