Google announced its answer to Amazon’s surprise success, its digital assistant and home audio speaker, the Echo. The Google Home is a standalone unit, quite a bit smaller than the Echo, which houses the Google Assistant – a rebadged Google Now by the sounds of it, and rival to Amazon’s Alexa.
However, the device was very conspicuously designed by the team behind Chromecast, part of a new division that is being led by ex-Motorola Rick Osterloh, who is in charge of uniting Google’s disparate hardware projects. But the big question is not why Google wants to move into the smart home, but why it decided not to use Nest.
Logically, Nest should have become the Alphabet brand for the smart home. Sure, the other Alphabet subsidiaries and Google divisions would have had experiments or early-stage projects that could have been rolled into Nest, but from the outside at least, we can see that hasn’t happened.
Nest was acquired for $3.2 billion, bought Dropcam’s home cameras for $555 million, paid out for Revolv’s smart home hub, and has apparently got very little return on the investment made by Google. It’s a worrying sign for the division, especially so for its leader, Tony Fadell – who has been accused of being a bad fit inside Alphabet, and didn’t come off well in the PR fallout from public minutes of a townhall meeting inside the Google parent company.
Amazon essentially stumbled onto the success of the Echo. After its infamously abortive Fire Phone project, it had developed the Alex AI-based digital assistant, and found that it had to put it to use somewhere. Amazon’s Lab126 skunkworks evidently had some inroads into a smart home project, and to the industry’s surprise, Amazon launched the Echo at the end of 2014, with a wider launch the following year.
Selling at $100 to Prime members, and $200 for the rest, the Echo is ostensibly a mechanism for Amazon to generate more sales inside its marketplace, by easily allowing customers access to the portal, and for conveniently ordering new things. The Echo is also a driver for music streaming and purchases, and in time might grow to push video offerings – via a Fire TV integration, perhaps, or simply as a recommendations vehicle.
Google’s Home will also play music, like the Echo, but the main focus is the wealth of data that the company can extract from the home and use to augment its online advertising profiles and demographics. If the Home can let a marketer know what other connected devices are in a home, or the hours of activity, or how the house uses the equipment within it, then the marketer stands to be able to use much more targeted, and effective, advertising.
As Google VP Mario Queiroz puts it, “when I walk into my house, I want to interact with the Google Assistant, but want to do it hands free. That’s why we’re creating Google Home. It will manage entertainment and your everyday tasks. It will let anyone in the family, kids or adults, have a conversation with Google.”
Those conversations will likely drive traffic to Google’s websites, and increase the ad impressions that the services yield. But more lucratively, they will help provide contextual user data that can be used to convince marketers to part with more of their budget, when they try to reach out to consumers.
Said to be released later this year, no price has yet been announced for the Home. There’s no word on the hardware specs yet, but it looks like the Home is the source of the rumors of a project called Chirp. At the moment, Home will only support Google services, which Amazon may be able to leverage in the coming months.
With WiFi being the only confirmed protocol, it doesn’t look like the Home is going to be much of a smart home hub that operators could use in their deployments. Home might certainly be able to parse and act on voice inputs and text queries from the Allo chat app, but without the low-power radios that are needed to connect to IoT smart home devices, then it will merely act as a bridge for another internet-connected hub, which will then translate those commands to the right devices.
Currently, the API to enable such third-party links is closed, but Google would be foolish to not open this up eventually. The Home is also said to be based on the Chromecast standard, which will enable it to push music and video to devices within the home.