Artificial intelligence powered smart assistants are all the rage these days and all the major tech companies seem to have already developed such a service or have adopted someone elses.
Amazon’s Alexa, built into its Echo devices, is the dominant market player right now, but Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Samsung’s Bixby and Google’s Assistant are among the main competitors.
Google has integrated its offering into a home assistant product called Home – a smart speaker that can be left in any room that there is power and a WiFi connection and that can offer a range of useful services.
DESIGN
The device itself is white in colour with a slate fabric base where the speaker is housed.
It has a touch surface on the slanted top for controlling volume, playing, pausing and activating it without the wake word, while the mic is also positioned there.
On the side is the mic mute button as well as a power status light.
Four coloured lights on the top appear, spin and pulse when the device hears the wake words, "Hey Google" or "Ok Google".
The same lights spin continuously when it is thinking and pulse constantly when it is responding.
They also provide an indication of what is happening when the device is setting up and when the system is carrying out a range of functions.
All told, it doesn’t look too bad and blends in better to its surroundings than the Amazon Echo.
SERVICES
But the hardware is really all secondary when it comes to Google Home and other gadgets like it.
The digital helper will do its best to deal with any query or request you throw at it and harnesses the power of Google search and other services within the ecosystem to do so.
It isn’t perfect – far from it in fact – but it gets it right a lot of the time and that performance will only improve as the system learns and the technology improves.
One of the main functions that most users are likely to use it for is music.
The audio quality, while not exactly top notch, is pretty good considering its size and price.
The device can run a number of music streaming services, including (not surprisingly) Google Play Music, Spotify, YouTube Music and Pandora, giving you access notionally to tens of millions of tunes.
Google Cast is built into Google Home, so you can audio or video stream via WiF to other devices that are connected to a Chromecast.
It isn’t always perfect at recognising what you have requested, particularly if the name of the song or artist or show is any way obscure.
It will also play audiobooks from Google Play Books and stream Podcasts.
SMART HOME
Smart home functionality is also integrated into the device.
It can connect to a large range of smart home ecosystems and specific devices.
Most of the big name platforms are there, like Google owned Nest of course, but also Philips Hue, Hive, Samsung SmartThings and more.
Setting up this integration is easy enough and within a minute or so I was able to bark instructions at the Google Home to turn my smart lights on and off.
With more and more ecosystems being added to the Google Home platform all the time, most mainstream established devices should be supported.
You can link a series of actions on smart home devices together using the "If this, then that (IFTTT)" service, but unlike the Amazon Echo, it isn’t built into the app.
There are also a number of other features which the device lacks compared to its main competitor.
Most of these revolve around the vast array of functions that third party developers have produced for the Echo – so-called Skills.
You can get simple localised content, like news update from RTE News for example, but on the whole the range of niche bespoke services on offer is limited so far.
One other surprising aspect of the Google Home is that it doesn’t integrate fully with many of the mainstay services that Google has built its empire upon, like Gmail, Docs, etc.
You can get a list of your events for the day from Calendar, but you cannot add any new ones, for example.
It is likely though that this shortcoming will be addressed in time.
PRIVACY AND SAFETY
When it comes to privacy and concerns that your Home device might be listening to and recording your conversations and then passing that info to the mothership or beyond, Google says there is no need to worry.
It says the device listens in short snippets of a few seconds each for the wake word.
Those snippets are deleted if the wake word is not detected, and none of that information leaves your device until the wake word is heard.
Only then does Google Home record what you say, and send it (including the few-second wake word recording) to Google in order to fulfil the request.
But those recordings can be deleted anytime through the My Activity section of the app.
In terms of what happens to data after that, Google says the usual safeguards are in place etc, but you might want to read the full explanations yourself to ensure you are satisfied.
Google Assistant also has "SafeSearch" turned on as a default, which helps to filter our explicit results.
CONCLUSION
In summary there is much to like about the Google Home.
It looks good, it is simple enough to set up and integrate, and it does plenty.
The integration with Chromecast is definitely an edge on the competition.
And yet, having tested both it and Amazon Echo for a while, it feels like the latter still has it's nose in front in the race.
It’s voice recognition is smoother, it has more features to offer through Skills, the smart home integrations is more evolved and the app is more refined.
That, of course, is the situation now, but with all its might and expertise, Google is likely to evolve the Home device at a rapid pace, leading to better integration with Google’s own services and expansion to include other third party offerings.
At €149 including free delivery, the Home is marginally cheaper than the similar Echo Plus.
But is likely that in time, the marginal gap between the two products on both price and features will be much smaller.
Comments welcome via Twitter to @willgoodbody
