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What is Google Home? – Everything you need to know

What is Google Home? This article will explain all possible details and working of Google home which you should know.
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What is Google Home

In this article, we’ll look at What is Google Home? You can do everything with it, including play music, look up YouTube videos, answer questions, control smart home devices and much more.

What is Google Home

We see more and more appearing; speakers that are equipped with a voice assistant and can help you with, among other things, operating your smart home, answering questions or viewing your agenda. Until recently, Amazon’s Echo speaker was the only really interesting option, but Google recently announced Google Home as a competitor.

Google home- Smart speakers with voice assistant

Both speakers are currently only available in the United States (and later the UK), but it is certain that they will come to the Netherlands sooner or later. and that is why it is also interesting for the Dutch to see what the possibilities are. In this article we look at ite, which is actually your ‘personal Google’. You can do everything with it, including play music, look up YouTube videos, answer questions, control smart home devices and much more.

Google Home hardware

It is a compact speaker that you can basically place anywhere in the house. The speaker has the shape of a cylinder and comes with a base (bottom) that can be finished in different colors. You can change the base yourself. The top, white part is the part where the intelligence is. The microphone is incorporated in this with which the device listens to your speech. There are LEDs on top of the speaker. These LEDs come in the four colors of Google, can light up and can rotate. For example, Google Home shows that ‘he’ is listening or performing an action. The top is also a touch surface with which you can manually perform some actions.

The speaker is placed in the housing, equipped with a 2-inch driver and two passive bass radiators. In addition, there is a ‘far-field’ microphone that can recognize speech at a greater distance. You do not necessarily have to stand next to the speaker. The device has WiFi and works with both Android and iOS software.

The smart assistant

Perhaps the most important part of Google Home is the Google Assistant. This is the personal assistant that helps you with everything. The assistant uses ‘artificial intelligence’ to find things for you on the internet, manage your calendar, play your media, operate your devices and much more. In addition, Google is continuously working on the assistant, so that it will only become smarter through updates.

You activate the it by saying “Ok, Google” to the speaker. As soon as the speaker responds, you can get answers to all your questions (from difficult math questions to the results of sports matches), set an alarm, add an appointment to your calendar, request the weather forecast, request the traffic information for your route, control your lights or the turn up the thermostat. You can’t think of it that bad and it is possible. You can of course just perform a search as you would via Google, but then via the personal assistant.

Smart home integration

For the smart home user, the integration with smart home devices is especially interesting. The device is compatible with a lot of smart devices, including Nest, Samsung and Philips. This makes it possible to operate your lamps, operate your thermostat and operate or monitor various sensors. Also IFTTT supported. Google expects that the number of partners will be expanded quickly, so that in the long term we must be able to operate the entire smart home through the Google Home speaker.

What is Google Home

Entertainment

Entertainment is an important part of our daily life and it responds to that. The speaker comes with support for a variety of music streaming services, including Google Play Music, Spotify, Pandora and TuneIn. To access the services you simply need to have an account and link it to Google Home. You can then ask the assistant to look up a song or start a playlist. The sound will then come from the Google Home – it is also a speaker – but you can also use Google Home to control Google Cast-compatible multiroom speakers (or multiple Google Home speakers) in your home network. In addition to streaming services, Home offers access to podcasts, radio stations and of course streaming via Google Cast apps or your Android smartphone.

Google home – Price and availability

The product is currently only for sale in the US and has been given a price of $ 129. It is not yet clear when the speaker will come to the Netherlands exactly.