Google Assistant and Google Home: Amazon Echo, But From Google (arstechnica.com)

At its developer conference I/O, Google on Wednesday unveiled Google Home, a small round gadget with microphones and speakers that listens and responds to your questions and commands. As you may have guessed, Google Home will compete with Amazon Echo. The company also announced Assistant. Ars Technica reports: Google's conversational assistant is in the same vein as Cortana and Siri, Google Assistant. Google Assistant will be on phones and wearables too, and Google says that it will be better at picking out the context of what you're doing than any of the competitors. As an example, when standing near Cloud Gate, better known as The Bean, in Chicago, you can ask Google Assistant "Who designed this?" Based on your location alone, Assistant will understand that you're probably referring to the large shiny sculpture in front of you, and answer "Anish Kapoor."The Google Home will be available for purchase later this year. CNET has more details.

Comments

Re:Serious question:

[93 Escort Wagon]

So your complaint is Siri doesn't understand that you want to use military time?

Just for kicks, I pulled out my iPhone and said "Siri, set an alarm for noon" - hey, presto, I have an alarm set for noon. Then I asked Siri to set an alarm for 1:20pm, and that worked too.

When I tried "set an alarm for sixteen-thirty", it initially didn't work... but that is because my phone isn't on 24-hour time. When I enabled that (Settings -> Date & Time -> 24-Hour Time), that same directive worked perfectly.