When Amazon introduced the Echo speaker and its virtual assistant Alexa, there weren’t any other gadgets like it in the market. But if rumors are to be believed, one company in Mountain View is looking at creating the perfect competitor to the hands-free speaker. Yes, Google has reportedly been working on a super top secret project that will bring its own personal assistant just like Echo and Alexa, and integrate it with other Google products and maybe 3rd-party clients as well.
This news came out in a profile of Nest CEO Tony Fadell in The Information, in which it was mentioned that Nest approached Google when they first heard about the news that they’re developing the Amazon Echo killer and wanted to be part of the project. Unfortunately for them, Google turned them down. Now there aren’t any details yet known about what the Google project is all about and what it can do, so a lot of things are still open for speculation.
We can assume of course that this speaker and digital assistant will be connected to the whole Google eco-system. So you can ask it to retrieve an email address for you from your contacts, tell you how many minutes it will take you to get to a certain destination, write down your to-do list on Google Keep, etc. However, you can actually do all these things on Google Now on your Android smartphone. This may mean that Google will work on something even better like integrating it into smart home systems, and system appliances.
Google will probably not confirm anything anytime soon since the product is probably still in the development stages. But it’s nice to dream what a Google hands-free speaker and digital assistant can do eh?
VIA: SlashGear
I was surprised google didn’t have google now baked into the onhubs. Google promoted the “its pretty so you can put it where you will use it” angle, and that would play perfect with a voice assistant.
Add in google’s slow move into home automation with NEST/dropcam and so many people using chromecasts and google could have something awesome on their hands (ok google play X on chromecast Y), so it is weird big G wouldn’t involve nest.