Google Home and Modern Voice Assistants Expand

Google Home reached consumers in November 2016, placing Google Assistant into an always-available smart speaker. The product competed directly with Amazon Echo and helped turn voice interfaces into a new platform category.

A far-field speaker has to detect speech from across a noisy room, recognize a wake phrase without continuously uploading everything it hears, and separate a user’s voice from music playing through its own speaker. After wake detection, cloud speech recognition and language models interpreted the request.

Google had an advantage in search and knowledge retrieval, while Amazon had an early lead in third-party voice skills. The competition pushed both companies to improve microphone arrays, speech recognition, smart-home integrations, and multi-device coordination.