Look and design
First of all the upper portion of Google Home is made entirely of white matte plastic with an off-angle slice across to the top. Hidden within the plastic is a circle of multi-color LEDs that light show up to when Google Home is listening as well working to complete a request. The bottom portion of this device is dedicated to a speaker for music and responding to users that they want to do, but it's hidden inside an interchangeable shell. Google is selling these either with a fabric layer or good solid metal.
That is how you might describe Google Home, but it doesn't really convey its design, which is a pretty tricky thing to explain. It's a work of art in the realm of subtlety – both interesting and utterly forgettable product. Everything about this device is designed to be easy to ignore. There are no shiny parts (unless you put on a metal base) and everything about it is non-descript. It even shares a couple of physical similarities to a Renuzit air freshener and I've got no doubt that was an intentional decision to encourage people to at a glance it and immediately dismiss it as something else.
Setup
There is one bit I would like to add since many people may not know it's possible to create groups of multiple Chrome cast Audio and Google Home devices and configure them to play in sync. Start in the Google Home app and open the Devices screen. Find one of the audio devices, open the overflow menu and tap Create group. Select the devices you want and give the group a name. Once that's done, cast some audio to the group and listen for the one that's ahead of the rest. Go to the overflow menu, Settings, Group delay correction. Follow the instructions and add a delay to each unit until you're happy with the results.
The catch to always listening
For as good as Google Home is at listening, there are at least a many of ways that it doesn't work as intended. Probably the most annoying is the now infamous "answering on another device" toast message. If your phone is set up to respond to the "Ok Google" activation phrase and it is in proximity to Home, you are going to see this at last. Google implemented a clever trick to prevent both your phone (or many phones) from trying to respond to the same command while Google Home is.
It is a great idea and necessary to prevent an obviously ridiculous situation when both devices are try to answer of the same request. Unfortunately, it can get in the way a lot. The anti-collision feature doesn't even attempt to route commands based on the situation. Once you're in the room with Home, that's all you're going to get. This wouldn't be so bad if not for limitations that only exist on Google Home (more on that in a bit). Frankly, I think this is the real reason there's a physical button to shut off the mics. It's basically the manual hack to work around the anti-collision mechanism. I have a feeling this will be the first "bug" that gets fixed..
Even if it happens rarely, it would be great to see a fix for it. The solution most people are proposing is to add voice recognition (not to be confused with speech recognition) so Home can discern who is talking, not just what they're saying. This may also solve the issue of multiple people automatically using the one and only signed-in account. Yes, Home is currently attached to just one account, much like Android TV before 6.0 came out.
I'm not trying to suggest voice recognition is automatic or easy to implement – it's certainly not – and I absolutely understand the many practical reasons it wasn't a feature at launch. However, I also know that it's something Google has done on phones (remember Trusted Voice?) and some Googlers have already confirmed it's coming in the future. Since we know it's in the works, I'm disinclined to ding Home too much for this shortcoming, but it's still something new buyers should be aware of.
The future
Google Home is a product sold at least partially on promises of what it will be able to do someday. While that's usually a bad thing in the tech industry, and especially for a company with a less than stellar track record for following through on ambitious products that require partnerships to make them successful (e.g. Google TV), things look much more promising for Google Home.
Netflix integration has already been demonstrated on stage. Uber is joining the list soon with Lyf surely coming shortly thereafter. Plenty of popular web services were shown on the partners list at the October 4th event. I think it's even safe to assume most of the home automation OEMs have been trying to arrange to work with Google as quickly as they can.
That's just the established and well-known companies. We're also going to see a lot of small and independent developers building out their own services to work with Google assistant once the open platform becomes available. As regular developers join the fray, we're sure to see something akin to Alexa's Skills appearing on Google assistant, but they'll be built with a better tool set and won't have to be preinstalled first – and that means avoiding the generally awful browsing experience of Alexa's Skill market.
I have every confidence all of those things are true and there will be much more to come; however, the realist in me is prepared to see a lot of those things take far longer than most of us anticipate.
thanks.
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