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Google Home review: A step forward for hotwords, a step backward in capability

A $129 voice appliance should be a pure upgrade over Android voice commands.

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  • The Google Home. It's listening!
  • Build your own Google Home with the Assistant SDK.
  • On the back is a mute button, power light, and Google logo.
  • Let's talk about the top. You've got 12 multicolor lights. Here it is booting up.
  • Normally the lights are off. After you say "Ok Google," four lights kick on and spin around. It looks like Google!
  • Hit the mute button, and the lights turn orange.
  • A Google Home smart speaker.
  • The hardest part is figuring out where to put the Sonos' power brick.
  • Google Home is a little taller and a little fatter than a can of soda.
  • Here's that power brick again.
  • The bottom of Google Home.
  • The whole bottom pops off.
  • Check out that speaker arrangement!
  • On the back is an old school MicroUSB port.
  • Here's the removable bottom.
  • Those two small circles are magnets.
  • Let's talk bottoms. Here's the default gray fabric one.
  • A nice copper metal cover. It's super heavy.
  • A shimmery fabric blue color.

Fresh off the launch of the Google Pixel, the new Google Hardware division is back with its second product: Google Home, a voice command appliance and Google Cast-enabled speaker. There is basically no interface at all to this product—it's all voice commands, all the time. I hope you like speaking to your electronics.

Google started its voice recognition journey all the way back in 2007 with "Goog-411," a completely automated phone number lookup service run over a 1-800 number. The human-powered 411 services offered by carriers would apply extra charges to your phone bill, but Google 411 was completely free. Google's goal wasn't to make money on the project, it just wanted to gather as much human speech as possible to build its speech recognition algorithms. Almost 10 years later, the company is finally ready to build a product that completely revolves around voice commands. Google Home is the "Star Trek Computer" the company has always talks about building—at least, it's version 0.1.

Yes, Google Home is boldly going where Amazon has gone before. This is an Amazon Echo clone to some degree. Google was beaten to the punch. It's now here to fight the market leader, but recall Google Search, Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps, and Android were "clones" of existing products, too. There's no telling if Google Home will be as successful as those products, but the existence of an established player has never been a much of a roadblock to success for Google before.

A Google product makes sense in this area. A voice appliance is, basically, a search engine. You give it some kind of input, and its job is to search through tons of content and third-party integrations to pick out the correct result. It's the same kind of voice recognition and natural language processing technology that Google has been working on for years at Google.com, on Android, and in the Google app.

Google Home is packing Google's usual "OK Google" voice system, which has recently been upgraded and rebranded as the "Google Assistant." You'll also get a heavy dose of Chromecast compatibility and media playback via the built-in speaker system. At $129, it's $50 cheaper than the Amazon Echo. If you want to drop the cash on multiple Google Homes, they're also designed to seamlessly mesh together, both in audio playback and voice command response.

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Ron Amadeo Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work. He loves to tinker and always seems to be working on a new project.

Channel Ars Technica

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