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By Marc Perton
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Google's big hardware launch event, held Tuesday in San Francisco, will inevitably be compared to Apple's iPhone 7 launch last month. And, given that the marquee device unveiled at the event was the Pixel smartphone, with a camera that Google says challenges Apple for the Best Smartphone Camera Ever crown, the search giant is inviting such comparisons.
But, like many of Google's efforts in the hardware world, the shiny boxes are less important than the software that powers them. In this case, that software is Assistant, the company's next-generation intelligent agent. Like Google Now before it, Assistant competes squarely with Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and, most significantly, with Amazon's Alexa, which powers the company's Echo smart speaker.
While Google also introduced a 4K-capable version of its Chromecast streaming device, a smart router system and a new virtual reality headset, the two biggest launches of the day were the Pixel and Google Home, a small speaker that seems to take its design cues from an air freshener, and which, like the Echo, can answer questions, control connected devices and play music.
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Assistant's functionality is a key selling point of the Pixel, and it's Home's only selling point. And, if you've bought into the Google ecosystem—meaning you use a Chromecast to stream videos to your TV, you use Google Play to listen to music, and you keep your agenda synced to Google Calendar—it could be a pretty strong selling point, since it enables you to access all of those services and more via voice commands. If you use the Google-owned Nest thermostat, you can tell Home to turn up the heat when you get cold. And if you use smart lights like Philips's Hue, you can tell Home to turn them on when you get home.
The Echo can perform similar tasks, and Amazon has opened the system to developers, who have come up with hundreds of new uses for the device. But the Home, at $129, is $40 cheaper, and has all of Google's data at its disposal. That same data powers Assistant on the Pixel phone, where it will fill the role Siri has long played on iPhones. "The goal is to build a personal Google for each and every user," Google CEO Sundar Pichai commented on Tuesday.
While devices like Home and Echo are still niche products—Amazon has sold an estimated 3.5 million Echos since 2014, which puts it roughly on par with the number of iPhones Apple ships in a week—they may well represent the next big step in human-computer interaction. Intelligent voice-response systems are already the norm for many customer-service applications, and it's only logical that similar applications would migrate to consumer products, especially when they're fueled by companies like Google and Amazon, which have massive amounts of data at their disposal, and have invested billions in artificial intelligence.
Today, these devices may be best known for resolving trivia questions or settling bets (at Tuesday's event, Google demonstrated how Home can be used to simulate flipping a coin), their utility increases almost daily; the Echo can already be used to reserve a car with Uber, order pizza from Domino's and recommend restaurants.
The real question, going forward, is whether enough people will be willing to open their homes to an always-on device that listens to everything they say, and knows almost everything about them, from the route they take to work, to the TV shows they watch to which friends they correspond with most. Given the amount of information we already share with services like Google, there's a good chance many will embrace the idea of a smart device that uses this data to anticipate their needs. Sure, it'll be creepy the first time Home wakes you up a half hour early because there's heavy traffic along the route Google Maps suggests you take to work, or orders flowers for your mother's birthday based on your Google Calendar listings. But the consumer AI revolution is here to stay, and the only question is whether your all-knowing assistant will be powered by Google, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft (or Facebook, of course). Just make sure you know where the Off switch is.
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