Amidst all of the other exciting A.I. developments coming out of the company’s I/O developer conference, Google has now revealed that its Google Home smart assistant is finally ready to spread out and among the first places it’s going is to Canada. Currently, the device is only available to customers in the United States and the United Kingdom. The announcement came as part of the Internet search giant’s keynote speech, as part of the conference which started on May 17 and runs until May 19. While no specific launch date was given, the A.I. powered device is said to be arriving in the country sometime in the summer of 2017. The ability to make calls via the IoT hub was also announced at I/O 2017 and Canadians will be getting access to that feature at some point as well. As with the Home device itself, however, Google didn’t mention exactly when that will be coming to customers in Canada or the U.S., but customers in the U.S. will be seeing the feature first.
Fortunately, Canadian users can expect most other features to be intact when Google Home is finally released in the country. That includes the new features announced today and the features that already existed for Google Home users. Among those is the ability to cast visual representations of responses to voice actions from Google Assistant to a compatible display, such as a smart TV or a television with a Chromecast dongle connected to it. Users will, of course, be able to send multimedia to the connected display but will also be able to send general information such as the schedule from a Calendar or address information and navigation directions.
In addition to coming to Canada, Google Home will also be heading to Austrailia, France, Germany, and Japan. For consumers outside of those countries, it goes without saying that the situation could easily change since there are still two days of I/O conference left to get through. However, today’s keynote was the most likely place for any announcements of the sort. In the meantime, Google users in Canada only have a few months left at most before they can begin using voice actions to control the plethora of smart home devices currently available.