Google offers devs fat bribes, hopes to lure them to its Home

Eager to catch up to Amazon and its Echo interactive speaker, Google at its annual developer conference on Wednesday offered everyone in attendance free Google Home hardware and $700 in Cloud Platform service credit to create apps that converse with the Google Assistant inhabiting its device. To sweeten its offer, Google …

[Anonymous Coward]

Google are definitely pushing Home. Currys staff are being offered Google Home half price ... I'm tempted, but I don't see me using it...

[alexmcm]

Same here, I couldn't imagine using it. Except I got one for my birthday, and it is now constantly in use by the family in the kitchen as a radio, an argument settler, info center, weather person, calculator, and podcast player. It's one of those things you don't know you need till you get it. Now the kids are wanting one for their bedroom.

[Anonymous Coward]

Currys staff are being offered Google Home half price ... I'm tempted, but I don't see me using it...

You work at Currys?

UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!

[Anonymous Coward]

kids love it

I never use my google home. Kids love it though. Constantly streaming music through it, asking it every question under the sun, etc etc. Don't see any of these assistants being more then children's toys for at least a few more years till AI starts really getting 'smart'.

[DropBear]

Re: kids love it

...or until those children start growing up (and start giving you funny looks for refusing to have one)...

[Peter 26]

Doesn't work for Google Apps users

If you want the techie community to use it, how about making it work for Google Apps (now G Suite) accounts? I'm not going to create completely new google accounts and lose access to my apps features just to use home..

[Charlie Clark]

This isn't the race you're looking for

Eager to catch up to Amazon and its Echo interactive speaker

Not really, Amazon has sold a couple of million of these, Google Assistant is already on far more phones and growing faster. Also Echo is very much a one-trick Pony, Google has already mapped out added value (to users) services to Assistant whereas Amazon is still working on speech recognition. But the main difference is that Amazon is in the game of selling stuff, Google is much more focused on improving its AI services: if speech/image/demand recognition works well for consumers then companies will be desperate to signup for the AI engine that provides the services.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This isn't the race you're looking for

"This isn't the race you're looking for "

Certainly isn't the race I'm looking for. It'll be the twelfth of never before one of these slurp-o-matic waste of space POS find their way into my home. And anything pre-loaded on my phone by Google already just sits their, a few megabytes of unused storage and unwanted code.

Even if all this AI and voice recognition worked, I simply don't see the incremental value that this device brings to adults; as somebody mentions above, its probably great for kids (although how they'll grow up, if they believe that Amazon or Google know all the answers.....).