Google Home and Modern Voice Assistants Expand

Google Home went on sale November 4, 2016 at $129, announced at Google I/O in May 2016 and launching four months after the Pixel phones introduced Google Assistant (October 4, 2016). The device competed directly with Amazon Echo (which had launched June 23, 2015 at $179.99 for Prime members) after Amazon had built a 1.5-year head start in the smart speaker market with Alexa. Google Home’s hardware included a 2-inch tweeter and passive bass radiator for audio output, a 7-microphone far-field array for voice pickup, and a 360° sound design with a fabric mesh exterior (replacing Amazon’s cylindrical black plastic aesthetic). The far-field microphone array performed beamforming — electronically steering the sensitive direction of the combined microphone pickup toward the detected voice source and suppressing the direction of the device’s own speaker output — to enable voice detection while music played at moderate volume from the same device. Always-on keyword detection (“Ok Google”) ran on-device using a small neural network model; the audio before and after keyword detection was streamed to Google’s servers for the full speech recognition and natural language processing to occur.

Google Assistant’s knowledge retrieval advantage over Amazon Alexa at the time of Google Home’s launch reflected Google’s decade of investment in the Knowledge Graph (structured facts about entities, relationships, and attributes) and its search index. Alexa could answer a substantial set of pre-defined skill queries (check weather, set timers, play Amazon Music, control Philips Hue lights) but struggled with open-ended factual questions that Google’s semantic search handled well. Alexa had approximately 3,000 third-party Skills available in November 2016 (growing rapidly from zero in 2015 after Amazon opened the Alexa Skills Kit), while Google Home launched with a smaller third-party integration set but deeper integration with Google’s own services: Google Calendar for scheduling, Google Maps for navigation, Google Play Music and Spotify for streaming, and Chromecast and Chromecast Audio for casting content to TVs and speakers. Smart home control worked through Google’s Works with Google Home program, supporting Nest (thermostats, cameras — Nest was a Google subsidiary from 2014), Philips Hue, SmartThings, and others via the Google Home app.

Amazon Echo’s commercial success (multiple analysts estimated 7–8 million Echo units sold in 2016, giving Amazon ~75% of the smart speaker market before Google Home’s launch) had demonstrated that consumers would use a voice interface persistently in the home for ambient computing rather than pulling out a phone for quick queries. Google Home represented Google’s bet that its search and NLU (Natural Language Understanding) capabilities gave it a sustainable quality advantage over Alexa for open-ended queries, while Amazon’s bet was on ecosystem breadth through Skills and deep e-commerce integration. Apple HomePod entered the category in February 2018 focusing on audio quality and Siri integration. Google subsequently released the Google Home Mini ($49, October 2017) and Google Home Max ($399, December 2017) to cover price tiers. By 2019, smart speaker combined installed base had reached approximately 150 million units globally, with Amazon and Google holding the majority of that market.