Google added a major new feature on Thursday to its home automation device, Google Home—the ability to distinguish between different voices in a household.
The upgrade means family members or roommates will be able to use the device to play their own music or get their day’s schedule without having to manually switch accounts within an app.
Google Home is an Internet-connected speaker that lets users search for information like the weather, traffic, and their daily schedule by using their voices. The device is powered by the company’s voice assistant, Google Assistant, which responds to questions and can connect to things like personal calendars and Gmail accounts to provide personalized information to users who ask.
Google Home is a challenger to Amazon (“AMZN”) Echo, a connected speaker that does much of the same thing. The big drawback to the six-month old Google Home is that it lacks some of those features available in Amazon Echo, which premiered a year earlier.
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Today, Google Home closed some of that gap with the Echo. Echo and Alexa lets multiple account holders integrate their music and Amazon shopping accounts, for example. However, to switch between accounts on Echo, users must specifically tell Alexa to do so while Google now automatically tells the difference between different voices.
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To add various accounts to the Home, users must go into the Google Home mobile app and link accounts for up to six users for one device. From there, Google says that the Assistant will automatically learn to distinguish different voices.
When someone starts speaking to Home with “Okay, Google” or “Hey, Google,” the device compares the voice to previous voices it has heard and determines its identity—all in a matter of milliseconds. This feature will start rolling out today for Google Home users in the U.S., and will expand to the U.K. In the coming months, the company said.
