Amazon infiltrated the home when no one was looking with a smart assistant loaded on some low-price hardware, and now the competition has a whole lot of catching up to do. In this last push ahead of the holidays, Google is certainly making a valiant effort.
The company’s Home hub has been available at retail since October, offering the promise of a whole lot of functionality on the way. In just the week, the team has added a slew of new controls to the device. Yesterday the connected product got support for Netflix, making it possible to play a select number of shows, skip through episodes, rewind, pause and turn on captions when connected to a Chromecast.
Google Photos support was on the docket as well (also requiring a Chromecast), bringing images to the big screen with specific commands involving places, things, dates and albums.
Home is also getting actions from 30 different companies, ranging from companies like Domino’s Pizza to news outlets like CNN and The Wall Street Journal to service like Product Hunt and WebMD, the latter of which lets users ask the device health-related questions – so, one assumes, you can finally say, “Hey Google, what is this rash?”