Did this category just mature a little?
Google owned this one. No question.
Yes, Google spent a ton on marketing. Its booth in the parking lot of the Las Vegas Convention Center was bigger than most houses. It had a roller coaster (kind of; it was really more of a flat “ride”). And Google back all the style with substance, demoing Google Assistant voice services far ahead of the competition and announcing a startling number of connected devices that work with its products.
Beyond Google’s dominance, smaller smart home sub-categories bloomed at CES, including GE’s C by GE smart lights and Whirlpool and its Yummly- and Google-powered connected kitchen products. With increased competition, and forward movement for certain categories, the smart home is no longer about gawking at the fact that you can control your lights with an app. The smart home appears to have grown up some.
In order of importance, here’s what we saw that stood out the most.
Google Assistant’s Interpreter mode is a great example of how deep experience in machine learning and natural language processing can pay off. International travelers may be the first to encounter Interpreter, since Google is piloting it at hotel concierge desks. With Interpreter, a Google Smart Display and eventually an Android phone can act as a translation tool for two people who need to carry on a conversation but don’t speak the same language. Right now, Interpreter can translate 27 different languages and not only shows the conversation on the screen, but the Assistant itself actually says both parts of the conversation out loud.
You can read the full hands-on conducted by my colleague Rich Nieva. Despite a few bumps, Google Interpreter Mode feels remarkably useful. It also looks like a sharp poke in the eye to Amazon’s competing Alexa voice service. (Alexa can only speak three languages right now, English, German, and Japanese, along with a handful of English dialects.) Amazon has a learning tool called Cleo to help Alexa add more languages, but Google launching Interpreter mode highlights a discrete edge for Assistant as an all-purpose service.
Google also laid the groundwork for an answer to Amazon’s avalanche of device announcements this past Fall. Google Assistant Connect is essentially a chip for third party device makers to add basic Google Assistant connectivity to their devices. As examples, Google demonstrated a concept, credit card-style e-Ink display that showed basic time, weather, and traffic information, provided by a direct connection to a nearby Google Home speaker. It also showed a mock-up of a smart button you could tie to a Google Home speaker to which you had associated a set of smart lights. The button itself doesn’t ping Google’s cloud service, but by pressing it, it sends the on/off command request to the Google Home device that does.
Think of Google Assistant Connect as the Google equivalent to Amazon’s Alexa Gadgets Toolkit. Amazon’s Echo Wall Clock is a product of that kit. The Clock doesn’t have an Alexa speaker built in, but instead sets the time and displays Alexa timers via data provided by its connection to an Echo speaker. Both kits enable developers to come to market with creative, lightweight products that can be either fun or useful to consumers, and also extend the reach of their respective voice platforms. I expect Google’s annual developer showcase, Google I/O, will have a deluge of new Google Assistant gadgets, similar to Amazon’s event last year.
