Google Home has just got two new features which brings it onto a par with Amazon Echo- music and phone calls.
Of course Google Home has always been able to play music, but they’ve just added Spotify which will make it appeal to millions of Spotify users around the world. All the time you had to use Google Play Music it was limited because frankly most of the world either use Apple or Spotify. Adding Spotify gives you all the music you already subscribe to at no additional charge and allows you to play it via voice commands with Google home.
The second feature is one that outdoes Amazon Echo, but appears to have been released and then swiftly rolled back. It’s the ability to call phone numbers in the US or Canada, including your personal contacts and millions of businesses, completely hands-free. Having the ability to make phone calls either to people in your address book or to business with Google looking up the number will be a real boost for the device when it’s fully available.
It’s tricky to see how this functionality will come to the UK – in the US on most calling plans local numbers are free so all Google needs are break outs from the Internet to local area telephone networks. In the UK with most numbers still chargeable this will be more tricky – especially when you consider that many people don’t even use landlines these days by rely on mobile phones which are more expensive.
What we’re really interested in is when you’ll be able to make purchases on Google Home. There’s no doubt that you should be keeping an eye on developments on voice control devices, it’s still early days but it is the future.
If you have a Google Home and are a Spotify subscriber then you can link the two together in the Google Home app. For voice calling, Google have released (a rather weird in my opinion) video to demonstrate what’s about to be released:
