While many companies have made the announcement that they are supporting Google Home, for those who haven’t followed the news constantly, whether their gadgets are Google Assistant-compatible may not be all that clear.
While many companies have made the announcement that they are supporting Google Home, for those who haven’t followed the news constantly, whether their gadgets are Google Assistant-compatible may not be all that clear.
To address this inconvenience, Google has made a webpage that has a searchable list of all current Google Home-compatible partners. The list links to each company’s product page, as well as Actions made by third-party developers. By searching “locks,” for example, users will see that smart locks of Alarm.com, August and Nexia allow users to lock the door by talking to Google Assistant. Companies are listed alphabetically.
According to Google, more than 1,000 smart home devices from over 150 brands support Google Home voice control, including Honeywell, Nest, Firefly Home, Lowe’s iDevices, Philips Hue, Logitech, LG, Netatmo, Samsung SmartThings, Arlo and Yeelight.
Although entering the market later than Amazon, Google is gaining more and more partners, and more voice application “Actions” are also showing up. Just recently, it added more than 50 new games, activities and stories designed for families with kids. In the Play category, children can ask Google to play with Mickey Mouse Adventure, Sports Illustrated Kids Trivia, Voice Tic-Tac-Toe and Musical Chairs. Thanks to Google Home’s voice recognition feature, the speaker can identify a kid’s voice and provide him or her an experience different from that offered to the parents.
Interacting with kids is an important functionality of smart speakers at home. Amazon has released similar support and features for kids on its Echo devices.
Google is catching up fast in the smart speaker market that is currently dominated by first mover Amazon. In addition to alluring more developers to its platform, Google has recently introduced different speaker models targeting different consumers. How the market will change in response to the unveiling of smart speakers made by Apple and Microsoft is still uncertain.