Remember Nest?
They’re a smart-home company best known
for their internet-connected thermostat. Google purchased the company in 2014.
Since then, they’ve been in the outer orbit of the Alphabet solar system of
brands, dubbed “Other Bets.”
That’s all changed now, though. In an interview on February
6th, Nest CEO Marwan Fawaz, who now reports to Google's hardware
chief, Rick Osterloh, appeared in a joint interview and discussed Nest’s return
to the fold: Nest will now officially be under the Google umbrella, instead of
its prior far-removed position.
"All of Google's investments in machine learning and
AI, they can very clearly benefit Nest products. It just makes sense to be
developing them together," Osterloh
said.
The play here is
obvious: Google wants to get its AI assistant out into the world, anywhere it can,
and smart speakers are a huge gateway to doing that. Amazon’s Echo, with its
attendant AI, Alexa, has already sold over 20
million units. The ecommerce giant dominates the “smart speaker” market
with a 69% share. Google might be the only other big player, with 31% of the
market, but that’s still less than half Amazon’s share. And the playing field
is about to get even tighter, as Apple’s HomePod smart speaker just went on
sale February 9th.
What does all this mean for smart homes? Google’s AI
assistant, despite lower usage numbers than Amazon’s, scored highly on an independent
assessment conducted by 360i, an NY-based digital marketing company. The
Google name also carries a lot of weight with consumers, and efforts to
increase the search giant’s hold on the smart speaker and smart home categories
dovetail well with its other recent hardware bets, especially their
Assistant-equipped Pixel phones. There'll most likely be a lot
more Google Assistant-equipped devices running around the market, whether they
be Google- or Nest-branded. Lastly, just as Amazon offers developers the chance
to integrate with Alexa via “Skills,” Google’s “Actions” let programmers plug into the Assistant in similar ways.
Amazon’s Alexa might have been the first to market and have
a huge lead on the competition, but there was no way the other big tech
companies were going to let that go uncontested. As AI assistant-equipped
speakers and other smart home tech continues to propagate, you can bet that
BuildingLink will stay on the leading edge, finding new ways to make buildings
run better and thrill our customers!
Don't have BuildingLink? Book
a demo and see what this powerful platform can do!
Stay tuned for our dedicated Aware! website.
No comments:
Post a Comment