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Multiple managers of Google Home held a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). Most were inundated with active users and home automation tinkerers.
The team developing and managing Amazon Alexa’s main rival in home automation assured they have a “vision and roadmap”. However, several Redditors who pounced on the opportunity to discuss Google Home’s future had more queries than answers.
Google Home on the web and “additional controls” on their way
Google Home is one of the most aggressively priced home automation and AI virtual assistants. The uniquely shaped Alexa competitor also rivals third-party and open-source solutions.
The Google Home team that participated in the Reddit AMA included quite a few product and engineering managers. Instead of a multimedia question-answer session, the Reddit CEO held recently to justify his handsome compensation, the Google Home team had a text-only session.
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Using the platform, several Redditors posted multiple lengthy posts. One particular post asked when Google would release additional Google Home controls on the web, add devices, and replace Google Assistant with Gemini.
Google Home team is actively working to, “bring additional device control to Google Home for web,” revealed Jacqueline, a Google Home and Nest Product Manager. Needless to add, this does not truly address the question, and the team hasn’t offered any timeline.
As is the norm, support for new devices and additional controls for the existing home automation and IoT devices should first appear in a Public Preview. As expected, the team remained tight-lipped about letting Google’s Gemini AI engine take over from Google Assistant.
Offline or local interactions coming soon to Google Home
For a multi-billion-dollar company, Google Home doesn’t appear to have an expansive and quickly-growing support for smart devices. Additionally, the product often struggles to understand human voices, several comments on the Reddit AMA indicated.
Presumably, that’s why Google Home doesn’t get as much promotion as a Pixel smartphone. The open-source Home Assistant platform, in comparison, has a lot of traction.
The entire Google Home platform seems to trailing its main rival Amazon Alexa and its products and services. During the Reddit AMA, the platform’s managers couldn’t commit to a large number of features, bugs, troubleshooting requests, and additions Redditors eagerly requested.
The team, however, did indirectly admit that Google Home’s instructions and interactions faced reliability and latency issues. To improve the speed or reduce the time taken between a user speaking out instructions and Google Home addressing them, Google is focused on routing more instructions locally.
Team member Daniel revealed that once Google feels it has a “significant” amount of your traffic operating locally, it will shift to focus on bringing “powerful” offline capabilities through the app. At present, Google Home users need an active internet connection for most of the instructions. This could change soon with a definitive offline mode for Google Home.