Google Home Gallery

By Chris Davies/Nov. 3, 2016 8:00 am EST

Amazon's Alexa has some new competition, with the Google Assistant once again finding its voice. This time, it's out of the Pixel and inside a new smart speaker, dubbed Google Home, a curvaceous little vase-lookalike that, rather than being filled with flowers, contains the fruits of Google's knowledge graph.

Shout "Ok Google" across the room and your Gmail, Calendar, streaming music services, and the depths of the internet are available for voice query. Meanwhile there's also smart home integration, with Philips Hue, Nest, SmartThings, and IFTTT support.

At $129, Google Home undercuts Amazon Echo – though not the much cheaper Echo Dot – though Alexa does still have an advantage in the number of third-party integrations already developed. Still, Google aims to court developers to do the same for Home and the Google Assistant as a whole come December 2016.