Google Nest Rumored To Be Moving Into Audio

CIStud writes Google's Nest, best known for its innovated smart Nest thermostats and Nest Protect smoke detectors, has posted several new job positions for "Nest Audio" including a leadership position to handle "acoustics, audio electronics, audio SW, audio test and validation for all Nest Products." From the TechCrunch article: "This is a new frontier for Nest. The company has so far utilized little audio in its products. Instead, Nest has so far recruited a couple of audio companies to join Nest’s world of Internet of Things through the 'Works With Nest' developer program. 'Google will help us fully realize our vision of the conscious home and allow us to change the world faster than we ever could if we continued to go it alone. We’ve had great momentum, but [Google] is a rocket ship,' said co-founder Tony Fadell when Google bought the company."

Comments

Squeezeplay

[fluffernutter]

So it is going to be like Squeezeplay, but connected to proprietary products instead of a server that runs on almost any hardware and free clients/controllers that you can install on windows/linux/android at will?

We'll see how it does. If it was Apple, I would say people would almost certainly buy it.

Re:Squeezeplay

[montulli]

I was/am a huge fan of Squeezeplay and the Squeezebox product lines. If Nest could combine the flexibility of Squeezebox, the simplicity of Sonos or Apple, and the reasonable prices of Google, they would have an amazing hit.

Re:Squeezeplay

[Anonymous Coward]

I stumbled onto the whole home automation market by accident recently, and am really frustrated. So much potential wasted by people trying to monopolize your money, when they'd all make money by being more open [libre].

Here's my rules:

1. Any home automation product should not depend on external servers. E.g., if I want to know the status of my thermostat, or humidity sensor, I should be able to access that information and communicate with the units from the LAN without going outside the home. As a corollary, I should have absolute control over access to products in my home.

2. Every product should support an open industry standard for wireless communication. Zwave or zigbee, or some better version, or both, or something like that. No idiosyncratic or proprietary protocols. I should be able to buy a zigbee temperature and humidity sensor and Ecobee should recognize it.

I don't see this field really taking off until both of those things happen. When it does, it will really revolutionize home, and we'll see the IoT. Until then, it's a hyped pipe dream. You *can* do all this now, buying zwave and zigbee units, and buying a hub that supports these things, but it will cost an arm and a leg. The stuff that's affordable now basically involves you getting locked into the cloud or whatever. And no, I won't take any company's word that they'll still be around in 10 years and offering their servers for free.

Great news

[Anonymous Coward]

Google found a way to place always-on microphones in everyone's homes. Fuck this company.

Re:Great news

[jmac_the_man]

Home audio generally means the opposite of that. You're listening to stuff sent to you by Google. Google isn't listening to stuff sent by you.

I'm guessing they're targetting Sonos

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems like Sonos is the biggest competitor with that exact functionality. Kind of like Google TV for audio. Stick the smart box somewhere, control it from your phone/tablet/pc but you don't have to stream directly from your phone/tablet/pc.

Oblig. XKCD

[tool462]

I feel like Randall was trolling /. with this one, but it's right on the money here:
http://xkcd.com/1497/

TIOT is going to be the end of us all...

[bjwest]

I'll say this again... Fuck The Internet of Things. Thermostats, smoke detectors, ovens, refrigerators, LED light bulbs and now audio? How much of our privacy and control are we going to give away? Networked devices are fine - if I retain full control and keep usage stats inhouse, but I'll be damed if I'll give control and monitoring over to any corporation in the name of "convenience". Why in hell does my temperature adjustment or light turning on or off or dimming need to go into the cloud, frigging before it even happens? There's enough processing power in a Raspbery Pi to handle the needs of the majority of homes, fuck your cloud spy devices.

Todays iCrap outage should be a wake up call, but I fear it won't. They'll patch (not fix, patch) whatever caused that, blame the problem on some terrorist group, and say it's all good. It'll happen again, and it'll be the same same again.

I'm glad I'm a do it yourselfer who can hack my house to do what I want it to do, because believe me, I will never give that much control and info of my life over to anyone. The rest of you... Well, if you handen't've (yes, that's a word) been such dicks to the nerds in high school/college, maybe you'd have someone to help you out.