• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, October 4, 2016

The competition for the voice activated agent in the home is now getting serious.

With Google’s official launch of its Home device, among a slew of other things yesterday, more consumers are going to become acutely aware that they can speak things in their home and their words will cause rather immediate actions.

Google is hardly new to voice, as anyone who uses Google Maps on a smartphone is well aware.

Unlike Apple’s sometimes annoying voice agent Siri, Google pretty much always can tell what you really said and respond accordingly.

And then there’s Amazon, whose Alexa via Echo has entered a few million homes already, bolstered by some clever TV spots.

At the moment, the Google-Amazon battle for the home audio device is the one to watch.

While many people have shopped Amazon, everyone knows what it means to Google something.

Amazon has been great at providing friction-free ways to buy things.

Google has been brilliant at helping people find things.

Google is a conduit; Amazon is a store.

Google’s DNA suggests it will open a wide, new avenue for consumers to connect to outside things more seamlessly. That, essentially, is what Google does.

Both Amazon and Google home devices will do some of the same thigs, like playing music on demand or turning light on or off. That’s not where the battle will be fought.

Amazon introduced to the market a way to put a small device in the home and interact with it by voice.

Google is about to show how that can be done at scale.