At an event this week, Google announced Google Home, a table-top box like Amazon’s Echo, and Pixel, an iPhone challenger, (see them here), but the real news was what’s under the hood: artificial intelligence in the software that listens to your voice commands and learns about you from experience. “A personal Google, just for you,” as a Google executive said at the event.
Google Home, available to buy now (at $129), sits in your home, has no keyboard and no screen. A user can order music to play by speaking a song title, or ask a factual question (“How old is Barack Obama?”) and other typical Googly stuff.
A Google exec also demonstrated how he could arrange to meet his wife for dinner before a concert by voice command to Google Assistant, the app inside Home and Pixel. Assistant arranged the whole date through Google Maps, OpenTable (the restaurant reservations app) and Uber (the taxi app).
No scrolling through search results, no competing search ads vying for attention, voice commands in natural language not keywords. And all the action through apps, closed systems so to speak–a restaurant that’s not an OpenTable member would be out of competition, it would seem.
Well, still early days, but watch (or listen to) the voice search space for coming big changes.
Read more:
Google’s hardware event was really all about its AI software (Recode.net)
Google Pixel And Google Home Attempt To Connect All Online-Offline Bases (GeoMarketing)
How Voice Search Will Change Digital Marketing — For the Better (Moz)
