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In the emerging war of the digital assistants, Amazon has the Echo, and Apple has Siri. (There is also Microsoft’s Cortana, for those keeping score.) Now, in a few weeks, Google is expected to challenge both with new information about Google Home, the voice-activated device it announced earlier this year. On October 4, Google is holding a press event in San Francisco, where the company will likely divulge details about its coming hardware endeavors. A video posted to Google’s Web site hints that the company’s announcement will involve phones, and Android Police reports that the event will be used to show off Google’s new line of “Pixel” smartphones, which, if the “madeby.google.com” URL of Google’s Web site for the event is any indication, means the phones are entirely made by Google—not with partners like Huawei or LG.
Other new products are also likely to be announced, including a new Chromecast and its Daydream virtual-reality device. But Google’s digital assistant is the device generating the most buzz. Google Home, which made its public debut earlier this year, is a small, cylindrical speaker that rivals the Amazon Echo—a smart-home product that has been a surprise smash hit. Previously, Google users could use Android phones to “speak” to a virtual assistant by saying “O.K., Google,” but there hadn’t been a comparable smart-home product until Google announced Google Home earlier this year.
Google technically already had a smart-home appliance in Nest, which it bought a few years ago, but Nest didn’t have the voice-activation capabilities of Google Home. Nest had wanted to take part in Google’s voice-automated technology project, the Information reported in March, but had been “rebuffed,” possibly underscoring alleged tensions between the two teams. Nest had also considered simply making its own version of Echo, but ultimately decided not to, amid fears that its customers wouldn’t trust such a device made by a search giant like Google. “At the end of the day, it’s Google,” one source told Re/code at the time. “There are trust issues.” Those fears seem to have been mitigated to some degree by the excited response to the Google Home announcement, though time will tell if Google can make a viable competitor to the Echo, which, as of April, had sales of 3 million units and counting.
