Google Home Will Add Support for WeMo Integration Soon

If you’ve been getting into the home automation, or the smart home world, then you’ve probably heard of Belkin’s Internet of Things brand, WeMo. It’s a fairly popular brand and has created some rather interesting products. They have some WiFi-enabled switches that can be controlled from your smartphone. These are pretty interesting because anything you plug into these switches can then be controlled from your smartphone, even dumb appliances like your microwave or TV. WeMo also has a slew of light switches which you can install in your home and control from your smartphone too. It’s a pretty tight ecosystem WeMo has created already.

Amazon’s Echo and other Alexa-powered products, already support controlling Belkin’s WeMo ecosystem via voice. This is what has put the Echo ahead of its competition, and now it appears that Google Home will be adding support for WeMo in the near future as well. Although a specific time has not been given. This means you’ll soon be able to tell the Google Assistant to turn your lights off, or turn on your TV, providing you have a supported WeMo outlet or switch. Which is really what these smart speakers are going to be, and that’s a hub for your Internet of Things devices like WeMo and Hue, which are the two most popular ecosystems right now.

The Google Home was announced by Google back during the summer at their developer conference in Mountain View. It was reannounced at their hardware event in October and then hit store shelves in November. So it is still fairly new, but like the Amazon Echo, it is continuing to learn and get better. Right now the Google Assistant’s functionality is still rather limited but that should be changing over the next few months. And adding in support for Belkin’s WeMo line of products is definitely going to help with user adoption. The Google Home is on sale now for $129, which is about $50 less than the Amazon Echo which is priced at $179. However, Amazon does have the slight advantage in the fact that Alexa is built into a few cheaper offerings like the Amazon Echo Dot and Amazon Tap, at $49 and $129 respectively.