Posted Tue Oct 4, 2016 at 12:00 PM PDT by Steven Cohen
The company's smart speaker with Google Assistant is now available for pre-order.
Google has announced pricing and availability for Google Home. The voice-activated smart speaker allows users to play music, ask questions, and control various devices around their home.
Google Home features a high-excursion driver with a dual passive radiator design, offering clean highs and deep lows for Hi-Fi streaming audio. The device also includes hidden LED lights and a capacitive touch surface on its top face, and buyers can customize the base with different colors and finishes. Using the new Google Assistant experience, Google Home lets customers ask questions, enjoy entertainment, stream music, and manage everyday tasks through conversational speech commands. Music support includes playback from services like Google Play Music, Pandora, Spotify, TuneIn, and YouTube Music (with additional platforms like iHeartRadio coming soon). Likewise, users can also stream audio directly from a smartphone to their Google Home by casting tracks from 100+ Chromecast-enabled apps on Android or iOS devices. In addition, customers can get real-time answers to various questions through their Google Home using integrated Google Search, offering easy access to weather forecasts, stock market info, traffic updates, sports news, and more.
Finally, Google Home also allows users to control various home devices, including speakers and TVs with Chromecast built-in. At launch, voice-support will include streaming videos from YouTube, and control for more services like Netflix and Google Photos will be added in the near future. Likewise, Google Home can control lights, thermostats, and switches with popular home automation systems like Philips Hue, Nest, Samsung SmartThings, and IFTTT.
Google Home is now available for pre-order for $129 from the Google Store, Best Buy, Target, and Walmart. Shipments are expected to begin in November. And as an added bonus, buyers who purchase a unit before the end of the year will also receive 6 free months of YouTube Red.
Source: Google
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