Google gets ready to launch voice-activated home device

Google Home, one of the company's latest developments, incorporates both voice assistance and search platforms.

|
Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
A sign outside the Google headquarters near San Jose, Calif. The tech giant is entering the field of smart home devices with the launch of Google Home this week.

The Internet of Things picked up the pace on Wednesday, as Google was expected to announce the release of Google Home, launching itself into the world of voice-activated smart home devices.

The latest project, known internally as Project Chirp, incorporates both voice assistance and search platforms, and can answer questions and carry out basic tasks. The device will be announced at Google's developers' conference in Silicon Valley on May 18, anonymous sources told The New York Times.  

"We're making everything contextually aware," Sundar Pichai, former head of the Google's Android phone software and now chief executive of Google, said at the 2014 developers' conference. "We want to know when you're at home, with your kids."

Consumers are increasingly interested in gadgets that will act like personal assistants in their home, from reading the day's headlines out loud, or adjusting the temperature in a room, to turning off the lights, as the Monitor's Max Lewontin reported in March:

The concept of connecting a variety of appliances, from coffeemakers to TVs,  to create a unified "smart home" is gradually gaining in popularity. Some 36 percent of consumers in a recent poll by the Nielsen affiliated group The Demand Institute said they were "excited" to incorporate more of the technology in their homes, while 34 percent were neutral.

Google will likely launch the device in the fall, according to a report earlier this year.

Google Home's competitor, Amazon Echo, was launched two years ago and has already sold about 3 million devices.

Google's rival has invested between $250,000 and $500,000 in TrackR, a bluetooth technology company, to improve home-assistant Echo. Alexa, as Echo's software is called, has gained abilities to call a car from Uber, order pizza from Domino's, get fitness information from Fitbit, and look up election news from NBC.

With Google Home now on their radar, thanks to the expected reveal at the I/O Conference, developers may start creating software to accompany it after its official launch. 

Consumer technology appears to be headed towards greater A.I. use to power home virtual agents. Apple's 2011 Siri for the iPhone quickly became very popular until it was overshadowed by the launch of Amazon Echo. Now, the launch of the new Google Home has the potential to overtake both.

"Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and others are all heading towards the virtual agent," Forrester Research analyst Julie A. Ask told The New York Times. "Google has seemingly let the competition catch up – level the playing field, even. It's all the more critical that they do well here, given earlier misses on instant messaging and social media."

The virtual agent technology is not completely settled yet, however, as software engineers negotiate issues around privacy and the kind of information the device offers to users and vice versa. The virtual agent works best when it collects as much information as possible about the user, but many buyers worry about the privacy costs of such convenience. 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Google gets ready to launch voice-activated home device
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2016/0518/Google-gets-ready-to-launch-voice-activated-home-device
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe