Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced today that 20 percent of all queries on its mobile app and Android devices are voice searches. That’s 1 out of every 5 searches, and this trend will only continue to grow. I hate to get all nostalgic, but it doesn’t seem that long ago when SEOs (myself included) were preaching about impact mobile devices were going to have on search. Now the debate about voice search’s impact has already been decided—huge.
Today the search giant introduced it’s competitor for the Amazon Echo—it’s called Google Home, and it will be dropping later this year.
The Verge did a great write-up about the Google Home that you can check out here, so I won’t get too deep in the weeds.
I’ll just point out a few of the cooler aspects of Alexa’s new competitor:
- Google Home is designed for music and the speaker promises to deliver “strong bass and clear highs”
- You can have several Google Home speakers throughout your house, and like Google Cast Audio you can talk to any speaker and tell it to play music on other speakers
- The device looks really sleek —a little nicer than the Echo in my opinion (but that’s debatable)
Google also announced that it has already integrated a range of third-party services into Google Home, including Uber, Pandora, OpenTable, Spotify, WhatsApp and Ticketmaster.
A few of us here at Clockwork are eager to get our hands on this latest entry into the personal assistant marketplace but since no release date has been announced it looks like we’re going to have to wait for now.
So what do you think of the digital personal assistant trend? How will this technology impact your business?
