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Google Home Gets Notifications, Hands-Free Calling, a TV Interface and More (theverge.com)
Google has announced several news features for Google Home to help it better compete against the Amazon Echo. The six new features coming to Google Home include: notifications, free calling to phones in the U.S. and Canada, calendar and reminders, more streaming services, a TV interface, and new locations. The Verge details each feature in its report: Notifications: Google calls this feature "proactive assistance." Essentially, Google Home will do its best to alert owners to things they need to know, like reminders, traffic alerts, or flight delays.
Free Calling To Phones In U.S. and Canada: Google is one-upping Amazon by letting the Home dial out to actual landline and mobile phones. Whenever this feature rolls out, you'll be able to ask the Home to call anyone on your contacts list, and it'll dial out to them on a private number.
Calendar and Reminders: You can finally set reminders and calendar entries. Finally.
More Streaming Services: Google Home has already been able to control a handful of music and video services, but it's about to get a bunch of major missing names. For music, that includes Spotify's free tier, Deezer, and SoundCloud. For video, it includes HBO Now and Hulu. On top of that, Home is also getting the ability to stream anything over Bluetooth.
A TV Interface: Sometimes you actually want to see what's going on, so Google's making a TV interface for the Google Home. You'll soon be able to ask the Home to send information to your TV, from basics like the weather and your calendar, to information it's looking up like nearby restaurants or YouTube videos you might want to watch.
New Locations: The Home is going to expand to five new countries this summer: Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and Japan.
Free Calling To Phones In U.S. and Canada: Google is one-upping Amazon by letting the Home dial out to actual landline and mobile phones. Whenever this feature rolls out, you'll be able to ask the Home to call anyone on your contacts list, and it'll dial out to them on a private number.
Calendar and Reminders: You can finally set reminders and calendar entries. Finally.
More Streaming Services: Google Home has already been able to control a handful of music and video services, but it's about to get a bunch of major missing names. For music, that includes Spotify's free tier, Deezer, and SoundCloud. For video, it includes HBO Now and Hulu. On top of that, Home is also getting the ability to stream anything over Bluetooth.
A TV Interface: Sometimes you actually want to see what's going on, so Google's making a TV interface for the Google Home. You'll soon be able to ask the Home to send information to your TV, from basics like the weather and your calendar, to information it's looking up like nearby restaurants or YouTube videos you might want to watch.
New Locations: The Home is going to expand to five new countries this summer: Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and Japan.
We should have a contest to see creative hackers will mess with this. Have Home Notifications call grandma - at 3 in the morning to tell her the grandkids have been kidnapped. Have Home call Iceland - over and over again...
"Essentially, Google Home will do its best to alert owners to things they need to know..."
Things the owners think they need to know, or things Google thinks the owners need to know? There is so much potential for wrongness there, i hardly know where to begin. "Open the garage doors, HAL."
...Will it do it in the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android from HHGTTG, or Bender from Futurama? Maybe Robby from Forbidden Planet, or Robot B-9 from Lost In Space?
*These* are the kinds of things Slashdotters want to know!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Does it still spy on you?
Sometimes you actually want to see what's going on, so Google's making a TV interface for the Google Home.
ITYM: Sometimes you actually want to see what's going on, so you turn on firewall packet logging, and whip out your European passport and file a request for all the data they have logged about you and devices you own.
So you're going allow one tentacle of an AI (more a statistical automat, with a bit of natural language) built by a large for-profit/information-gathering company into your home and personal affairs?
That, in exchange for some fairly trivial help on things that you can easily do yourself, 'reminders', 'manual Googling' (or preferably DuckDucking), turning the lights on and off. So you can sit on your sofa and gradually turn into an amorphous blob?
IANALu (I am not a Luddite, as opposed to IANAL) but, as they say, "I don't think so". Really, I don't.
On y va, qui mal y pense!