For six months, Amazon's artificial intelligence personal assistant Alexa has been unchallenged in the UK. Now, it's biggest competitor, Google is bringing its Echo rival to the country.
Read more: Google Assistant is coming to the iPhone. Here's how to use it
Shaped somewhere between a cylinder and a pear, Google Home combines the search giant's artificial intelligence with a built-in speaker and, at a press event in London, the firm finally announced the device is coming to the UK.
Google Home will go on sale on April 6 on the Google Store and costs £129. The firm will also be selling Home through several partner stores, including Argos, Dixons, John Lewis and Maplin. Different coloured bases will be on sale for £18 for fabric and £36 for the metal bases.
To customise its service in the UK, Google has teamed up with the BBC, Guardian, Financial Times, The Sun, Telegraph, Huffington Post, Sky News, Sky Sports to provide news updates based on your location.
The tech giant also announced its Wi-Fi router will go on sale locally soon, too. Google Wi-Fi is a collection of small routers that can be placed around a home, which the company claims will improve wireless signal.
Google first unveiled Google Home at an event in San Francisco last year. It comes with a choice of fabric or metal bases and is powered by Google Assistant, which also works across its Pixel phones, and has stated to roll-out to other Android devices.
In a similar way to how the Amazon Echo and Echo Dot work, Google Home uses far-field voice recognition to detect a person asking questions before responding. The device wakes up when it hears the words, "Okay Google" and begins to recognise what is being said.
LED lights on top of the Google Home – in the familiar Google primary colours – are turned on when the device is listening. There's a mic mute button to stop the device from listening for the "Okay" saying and on top of the device is a control panel that can be operated with the hands to turn the volume up and down.
Users can ask questions, play music, and control smartphone devices with the small speaker, and Google Home uses Google's search technology to find answers from the internet before they are read out to the questioner.
Previously, Google'shardware chief Rick Osterloh confirmed the speaker would arrive "before the end of June." The delay, which is common with products being released in multiple regions, is believed to have been caused by the fact Google wanted to train the AI to recognise UK voices, make modifications using feedback received from US customers and to increase the number of UK launch day partners it has.
The market for home personal assistants is slowly becoming more saturated but has been largely dominated by Amazon. Apple's version is said to be a year from completion, and Mark Zuckerberg's butler is just a personal project.
At launch in the US, Google Home partnered with Nest, Samsung's Smart Things, Phillips Hue, and IFTTT. Those with Google's Chromecast video streaming player can also control their televisions with Google Home. And Netflix has added voice control, with Google initially demonstrating this on stage by saying: "Okay Google, play Stranger Things."
Read more: What can Alexa do? The best Alexa skills and commands
Elsewhere, Google Home connects to other Home devices and if multiple speakers are in different rooms, they can all be used to play the same thing.
Google first mentioned the Home device at its I/O developer conference in May 2016. "Google Home is a voice-activated product that brings the Google Assistant to any room in your house," the company said at the time.
While Google Assistantmade its public debut in Google's Allo messaging app, released in September.
The Assistant is a powerful AI chatbot capable of pulling in Google search results, and answer questions, on a number of levels. After asking the text-based version of Assistant one question, it provides follow-up questions that may also be relevant.
Google's Assistant is also able to tap into its other services. Once permission is granted the AI can scan emails, calendars, files, and personal photos held in other Google products.
It's impossible not to compare Google Home to Amazon's Echo device. Since it's launch, the Amazon device has been the only home personal assistant on the market - it is the device to beat.
Home is much smaller than the Amazon Echo, although it is bigger than the hockey-puck sized Dot. The Home can easily be held in one hand, is light and not much bigger than a small potted plant. There's only one button on its shell, which mutes the inbuilt range of microphones.
To operate, Home is responsive. Saying 'Okay Google', or 'Hey Google' triggers the microphones and four lights on top of the device, in Google's colours, are activated.
As with many product launches, changes had to be made to bring Home from the US to the UK. The biggest of these ensured the device could understand different accents.
Suveer Kothari, director of product partnership and planning at Google Home, told WIRED it was a "huge challenge" to make sure the device could understand different accents. "We switched the accent to be English," Kothari told WIRED.
"We did a lot of work on voice recognition and making sure its really able to understand what we're saying," he explained. This process included using data from voice searches – Kothari says 20 per cent of searches in Google's Android app, in the US, are done using voice – and testing the voice recognition with Google staff members around the world.
The responses from Home are in large parts scripted. Former Pixar storyteller Emma Coates has been involved in writing Home's scripts and for the UK these have been adapted. When asked what it is scared of, Google Home, in a typically British way, responds: "Four words. Rail replacement bus service." Kothari says there are a number of UK-specific Easter eggs included with Home.
During limited tests of the device, Google showed how it can be used to control smart home devices and answer questions. When answering queries Google Home draws upon its parent company's speciality: search. It pulls results for questions about currency exchanges, sports results and more.
At launch, the Home doesn't have the same range of third parties available to it as the Echo. Through Chromecast it is possible to play and pause Netflix shows. Amazon only allows voice to control televisions when its Firestick TV Remote is used - for this a button has to be pressed to use voice functionality.
The biggest difference between the Amazon Echo and Google's Home is its ability to use context. With Home, you are able to ask repeat questions to the device and it understands what was said in the previous question. For example, when snoozing an alarm it is possible to say 'give me two more minutes' and the alarm will reset. With the Echo, the user has to specifically say 'set alarm'. This initial impression gives a slight advantage to Google Home.
However, it should be noted these tests were in a controlled environment. They were all conducted at the firm's press event in artificial rooms. The systems were set-up by Google and its partners but the true test of the Home's capabilities will be when it is used in customers' homes.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
