Hardware Specifications:
Standing at 5.62 inches or 143 mm tall and 3.79 inches or 96 mm in diameter and weighing at around 480 grams, it has a cylindrical shape with 4 LEDs on the top of the device programmed to indicate battery life. The upper surface is also equipped with a capacitive touch panel which allows play/pause music, adjusting volume or opening up the Google assistant. Powered by the same ARM processor and WIFI module present on the Chromecast, it is a pretty compact device that turns your residence into a Smart Home. The base comes with an interchangeable cover with various colors like carbon, copper, snow, marine, mango and violet.
Know Your Companion:
Google Home seamlessly controls home devices and products like Nest Thermostat, Philips, IFTTT and SmartThings. It also behaves like a Chromecast and using voice commands it can stream audio and video to compatible devices. So if you feel lazy, you can just ask the device to adjust the room temperature or play your favorite TV show for you from your bed! It is rumored that Netflix is working on adding voice commands to their apps and soon Google Home will support it.
The Google assistant supports YouTube, Pandora, Google Play Music, IHeart Radio and Tunein. It comes with a feature viz. “My Day” which lets the assistant access information about the daily schedule of the user. Before heading out of the door you may ask “Ok Google, How’s the weather?” and it will say it loud for you. Consider a situation that you may have more than one speaker in your home; Google clarified that the devices comes with a dual microphone set up and the one which hears the voice best will wake up.
It is context aware which makes it far easier to talk to. Conversations with the device seem a lot easier compared to Amazon’s Echo. However it can access information from only one Google account. This may considered as a minute drawback as nowadays everyone has more than one personal account. Hope it gets fixed soon.
The Final Verdict
So should you buy it? If you are out in the market for a portable speaker then the Google Home is definitely a wise choice. It has great quality sound output and a compact design. It excels in what it is meant to do i.e. provide a seamless interconnection between devices and play quality music. Yes, it doesn’t come cheap but it delivers for the price point. There are alternatives in the market but a product from a tech-giant like Google is always preferable.
