Google Assistant Connect Is Like a Smart, E Ink Fridge Magnet

LAS VEGAS—Google Assistant just opened a new front in the war against Alexa. With the Lenovo Smart Clock, Google smart displays are getting tiny—tiny enough to be an inexpensive bedside alarm clock. And with Google Assistant Connect, Google is throwing internet information onto little E Ink screens that you can tack to your fridge.

"We're going to enable device manufacturers to create these devices at a lower cost and make them easier to set up," says Google product management director Lilian Rincon.

We have a full hands-on with the Lenovo Smart Clock, but in Google's huge booth just outside the convention center here at CES, the company showed off a prototype of its Assistant Connect gadgets, which could be even smaller and simpler than the $79 Smart Clock.

If the Clock is a shrunk-down Home Hub and an Echo Spot ($129.99 at Amazon) competitor, Google Assistant Connect gadgets compete with Amazon's Alexa Gadgets. The prototype we saw was much more useful than Amazon's Big Mouth Billy Bass, though: it was a little E Ink square that received notifications pushed from Google, such as weather information or traffic details. It wasn't clear how that data would get fed to the square; it looks like you'd ask Google Assistant on a smart speaker to update it with specific data periodically. Google promised more details on that this year.

Along with the Smart Clock and Assistant Connect, Google rolled out a bunch of updates to Assistant today, enabling new features. The system can translate languages now, help you check in for flights, and share your location and ETA when you're on the road.

But when it came to throwing shade at Amazon, the subtlest and most powerful dig came as Google demoed its ability to handle very context-dependent, complex natural language queries. "What episode did Rachel lose her apartment to Ross in?" requires a massive amount of contextual knowledge to properly answer, and yet the Assistant did. The system can also now chain queries—for instance, asking "what time is it in Singapore and how's the weather?"

Alexa can't do that; Amazon's voice assistant is still behind Google when it comes to vague, natural-language queries, because Google is a search engine and Amazon is still basically a shopping site. And if Google is going to open up a lead in front of Amazon, it isn't going to be in partnerships, as chipset and smart home makers want to support both: it's going to be in Google's superior handling of plain-English questions.

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As we saw last year, CES continues to be a battle royale between Amazon and Google to seize the most smart home partners and new features. Google announced a stack of them here, as did Amazon. It's painfully clear that they're the two major players in voice assistants.

Samsung is trying to make Bixby a thing, with a giant banner on the North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, but it doesn't have much in the way of partners. Apple has made some big headway introducing AirPlay to TVs, but we haven't heard a lot about Siri—and absolutely nothing about Cortana. It looks like if you want to control the world around you, you have two choices, for now.

Hands on With Lenovo's Smart Clock for Google