Introducing the Google Home Assistant
Get real-time answers including the latest on weather, traffic, finance, sports, local businesses and more with the Google Home Assistant. A simple voice request triggers Google Home to play music, podcasts or radio from services like Google Play Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, Pandora and more. With your permission, Google Home will learn about you and retrieve your flight information, set alarms and timers, and even tell you about the traffic on your way to work.
Google Home connects seamlessly with smart devices like Chromecast, Nest and Philips Hue, so you can use your voice to set the perfect temperature or turn down the lights. Cast your favourite movies, videos and shows to your TV. Just ask Google Home. With a simple voice command, play tunes from services like YouTube Music, Google Play Music, Pandora, and Spotify. Enjoy even more compatible audio services by streaming directly from your phone to Google Home. Get answers to things you want to know including the latest on weather, traffic, finance, sports, and more.
With your permission, Google Home can help you with things like your commute, flight information, and more. Plus it’s a whiz at setting alarms, starting timers, and adding items to your shopping list. Simply ask Google Home to stream videos to your TV with Chromecast or to turn up your Nest thermostat. Google Home’s high excursion speaker delivers HiFi sound quality. It can also hear you reliably thanks to far-field microphones.
Google Home Assistant – Design
Google Home still looks fantastic. It’s been designed as something you’ll want to put on show, looking less like a speaker and more like a fancy lamp or diffuser.
To keep the speaker’s design as uncluttered as possible, there’s only one physical button on the Google Home. It disables the microphone, if you don’t want the speaker to listen in on you.
As far as physical buttons go, there’s just the one: a large microphone mute button on the back, should you be a little privacy-conscious and don’t want Home listening in on you 24/7. There’s also a capacitive touch panel on the top, which you can use to adjust the volume – with the speaker’s four LED indicator lights changing to a radial volume indicator as you do so – or play/pause your music with a tap. A long press and Home will start listening, saving you from having to bark “OK Google” prior to every request.
Google Home – Features
Out of the box, it’s fair to say that the Google Assistant is smarter than Alexa. Thanks to the range of Google services in the background, the Assistant can tell you the address of a local business, for example, and then follow up with directions to get there. Amazon’s Alexa AI still only offers driving instructions between two points that you set in the app, and often fails to find addresses when asked.
