Google Assistant

Google Assistant’s features are definitely fragmented throughout its various platforms. Home can do one thing, Android Wear can’t. Android phones can do one thing, Android TV can’t — you get the picture. Recently, Google finally flipped the switch on one of Home’s best features to enable it on phones — Chromecast integration.

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Google’s shopping service, Google Express, has been expanding quite a bit recently, and today that includes the launch of a partnership with Target.

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The Google Home Mini was announced at Google’s big hardware event last week, and it’s an awesome little product. However, it seems that at least some early units have shipped with a pretty major defect that brings our worst fears with these always-listening assistant to reality.

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Last year I said that the first Google Home was a great start, but not yet functionally up to par with the comparable offerings from Amazon. Google has all but caught up since then. The feature set of the original Google Home is fleshed out — it works with just about as many third-party services as you could want — and now Google has introduced a smaller, cheaper Home to take on the Echo Dot.

The short version is this: The new Google Home Mini joins the Chromecast as another impulse buy in Google’s hardware lineup.

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Truly wireless headphones are the latest craze in the “wearable” industry, and the top player right now, for good reason, is Apple’s AirPods. The $159 wireless earbuds are perfect for iPhone users, but they also work pretty well with Android. Now an Android developer has taken that to the next level by giving AirPods the ability to summon Google Assistant.

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Ahead of last week’s October 4th hardware event, Google rolled out male and female voice options for Assistant in English. A nice customization, the new voices also sound more realistic. This is due to work done by Alphabet’s DeepMind division and the new deep neural network being leveraged for sound synthesis.

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Google Home and other Assistant-enabled smart speakers are great out of the box, but they’ve just been getting better and better lately. Today, it’s been discovered that Google Home has a few extra tricks hidden up its sleeve…

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After announcing the first “headphones optimized for the Google Assistant” last month, Google unveiled their own pair today. Instead of an over-the-design, the Google Pixel Buds are Bluetooth earbuds attached via a wire.

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Much like how Google Assistant was announced at I/O 16 and initially premiered with the Pixel last year, Google Lens is seeing a similar release schedule. These “set of vision based computing capabilities” for performing tasks like visual search is launching first on the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL.

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In addition to promising Google Assistant support next year, Sonos has unveiled its latest wireless speaker: the Sonos One. The new model replaces the Sonos Play:1 in the lineup at the $199 level with models available in both white and now black. Sonos One is the company’s first wireless speaker with built-in voice control.

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Google has made quite a few moves with smart speaker devices in the past few weeks, and that’s undoubtedly because the company is preparing to bring a lot of new hardware to the table on its own and with partners. To help users better manage their various Assistant speakers, Google is now allowing the ability to assign those devices to specific rooms.

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Several days ago we did a teardown of version 7.12 of the Google app and were able to activate a second voice for Google Assistant. This voice was male, but it was not yet live for users to select. Sometime since then, Google pushed out an update enabling users to switch between the female voice (Voice I) and the male voice (Voice II). Here’s how to do it…

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Google, just like Amazon, is working hard to get its virtual assistant on almost every physical platform that it possibly can. This includes phones, speakers, security cameras, appliances, TVs, and more. But as someone who spends close to 80 to 90 percent of my time on a computer, I want an official Google Assistant app that is accessible from both my Apple laptop and Windows desktop.

While we know Google is working to bring Assistant to Chromebooks, and there are ways to build your own Assistant app for Mac and PC, there isn’t an official option that packs with it all of the functionality found elsewhere.

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The latest beta of the Google app is rolling out this morning and features a number of strings related to Assistant. Version 7.13 notes new features in the works for Assistant-enabled headphones, as well as what is possibly a new device: “Google Earphones.”

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For the past several weeks, we have been able to activate a new rounded interface for the Google Assistant on Android. That new look is now rolling out first to iOS through an update to the dedicated Google Assistant app today.

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