October 10, 2018 • 8 mins
Google Home Hub is a smart speaker with a screen. It uses the Google Assistant to answer questions, show videos, function as a digital picture frame and more. An interview with Ashton Udall, product manager for Google Home products about the device including features and usage tips, plus why Google decided to leave a camera out of this first version.Watch my hands on video with Google Home Hubhttps://youtu.be/2XxBChI-2rAFollow Rich on Social Media:Facebook: http://facebook.com/RichOnTechTwitter: http://twitter.com/richdemuroInstagram: http://instagram.com/richontech Easy ways to listen on your phone or smart speaker:"Hey Google, Play the Rich on Tech Podcast""Hey Siri, Play the Rich on Tech Podcast""Alexa, Enable the Rich on Tech Flash Briefing"
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Google Smart Speaker gets a screen. It's now called the
Google Home Hub.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
What's going on. I'm Rich Demiro.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Rich on Tech, and joining me today is
Ashton Udahl from Google Home Hub.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
He's a product manager there, and this is a brand
new product. Think of it as a.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Tablet, but with a Google Home built in. This can
go on your counter, it can go next to your bed,
wherever you need a screen combined with the smarts of
Google and all that cool stuff the speaker can do.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Ashton, thanks so much for joining me.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Thanks for having me Rich.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
All right, so let's dive into the Google Home Hub.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
This is a product that we kind of assumed what
happened sooner than later. It kind of mixes the best
of the screen on your phone with the smart speaker
plus Google.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (00:44):
We wanted to build off the early success that our
speaker products had in the market and learn from those
and we went out. We talked to customers to understand
what they really wanted, and we realized that you know,
most of I should say many of Google's most popular
services search, photos, YouTube, calendar, maps.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
All these things leverage a visual interface.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
So we realized that when we built Google Home Hub
and we brought a display into the mix that this
was going to.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Be a really powerful opportunity to help people in their homes.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
So just some nuts and bolts of the device.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
It's got to seven inch screen, no camera, but it
does have a light sensor, which is really handy for
adapting the screen to sort of the different rooms you
might put it in. It's got a speaker, and of
course the display is really important because if you have
this bedside, you want it to function as sort of
maybe a display with pictures during the day, but at
(01:37):
night when you're trying to sleep, you don't want it
to be that busy.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
So tell me what you did for that.
Speaker 4 (01:40):
Yeah, So we wanted this product to be able to
go in any room in the home, and an important
part of doing that is not making people feel like
this was another techie gadget with blue screen light and
blinky lights. So we incorporated a sensor that measures the lighting,
the brightness and the color in your environment, and it
actually emulates.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
That lighting on the display itself. So you want to
set the.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
Mood in the evening, you have light bulb incandescent light
bulbs on, or it gets a little bit darker. We
actually bring down the brightness of the screen and we
match the color temperature so it feels just like another
photo frame around your home.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
And so some of the things you can do with
this device is think, you know, a Google Home speaker,
but with the added ability to kind of see what
you're doing. So let's say you ask for directions somewhere,
It's going to visually show you those directions. Let's say
you want to see your Nest cam outside the front door,
it can visually show you that camera.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
It can control your smart.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Home devices, but not just control, but also has that
missing link of like it can tell you the status
if they're on or off right exactly.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
So one of the things people wanted most was a
sense of control in their homes and smart home devices
they aim to deliver that, but a lot of times
you just feel like you're searching through a lot of
apps and trying to find the right one.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
And it's a bit of a hassle.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
And we wanted to do away with that for people,
so we gave people what's called the Home View. It's
a single interface that's super easy access that you can
see a summary for everything that's going on in your
home and tap right in and control each of those things, and.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Tell me about Obviously, this is going to be something
that people look at pictures on, they watch little video
clips on, see cooking videos, you know, if it's in
the kitchen, you can see you know, how to chop
an onion. Tell me about that screen and kind of
what you envision people viewing on this.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
Yeah, so of course you can get all kinds of
answers powered by Google Search.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
And all kinds of information.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
There. It is right there, it is.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
It sounds pretty good, right, music as well.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
Music streaming media, your favorite shows, sports highlights. It has
YouTube music and you can also set up YouTube TV
on your hub. So this can now become your kitchen
TV on your countertop, taking the latest highlights from your
favorite sports team.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
And it's just really exciting.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
To be able to give people access to so much
content out there via YouTube.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Now, I think the trojan horse of this device is
I mean, obviously a lot of people know about the
Google Home and the speakers. Maybe they're like, oh, I
don't really need that. Perhaps I don't think that's true,
but some people might think that. But with this, the
idea that you can have your photos displayed on this
people like the idea of we take all these digital pictures,
they kind of live on our phones, on our computers.
(04:14):
We don't see them as much as we'd like to write.
So with this you might have the people who adapt
it or adopt it just for the photo ability that
it's going to show ambient pictures throughout the day, right absolutely.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
You know, Google, we make phones with some of the
world leading camera capabilities, but you take lots of pictures
and you realize that they just end up staying on
your phone. As you said, it's really hard to enjoy them.
And so Hub really completes the puzzle here because now
it gives you a great way to consume those photos
around your home. Of course, you can create albums and
(04:48):
stream them to Hub to show your favorite photos, but
we realized that that takes a lot of work, and
people with you know, busy households or families, they don't
often have times to stop and do that. So we
said to ourselves, how about we take all of the
work out of this, and the Google Photos Assistant can
actually pick the photos of the people that you select
and care about most and then automagically stream those to
(05:09):
your Google Home Hub.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
So everybody can enjoy those work free throughout the day.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
So you're talking about a feature called live Albums, and
this takes all the guests work out of sharing pictures
because I can say, here's my two kids. I can
tell the Google Assistant, these are.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
The pictures I'd like stream to.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
My mom's Google Home Hub, and it will actually find
those pictures of my kids that I take and share
them with her exactly.
Speaker 4 (05:31):
So it takes all the work of curating the album
out for you. So you tell the Google Assistant the
people you care about most, and the Google Assistant can
go through your pictures and recognize the best pictures of
those people. It does that by filtering out all the
pictures with poor lighting, blurry motion, eyes closed, and it
picks the best pictures of those and then automatically streams
(05:53):
them as they get updated to your mom's hub.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Now it's interesting because I've noticed in Google Photos that
it highlights pictures that it makes them bigger, the ones
that thinks are the best, right yep, So this is
kind of building upon that. We knew this was kind
of doing that, but now it's actually putting those pictures
in its own little like putting that smart to work.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
Exactly, So it's really making AI work for you by
being able to take your photos and automatically pick the
best ones. Now you can put a hub anywhere in
your home and enjoy those pictures all day long.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
And other things you could do with the hub pretty
standard stuff like make phone calls, look up directions.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
To places, obviously, Google search for just about anything. Is
there anything else we should know about this device?
Speaker 4 (06:38):
You know, I think there's a lot in there. You
mentioned a lot of great ones. It's a great secret
sous chef. It can be your secret weapon in the kitchen.
You can come home and if you just can't think
of what to make, you can actually tell it what
ingredients you have, and it'll suggest great recipes for you
based on those ingredients. So it can take a lot
of the thinking work and guesswork out of the cooking
(06:58):
and the kitchen.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
There's a lot of ways into the device.
Speaker 4 (07:01):
The best thing about it is people generally see a
problem that they want to solve with it, and then
once they get in they get exposed to these other capabilities,
and over time it just gets.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
More and more useful, more and more delightful for people.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Where do you see people putting this in their homes.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
Really, it can go anywhere, and that's what it's designed for.
So of course the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom,
those will probably be the primary places. But the screen
is big enough to enjoy a video, say if you
set it up, you know, in a little bit.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
Further away on a shelf or a side table. You know.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
It can also be small enough to fit on a
small table and say a hallway.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
So really it's extremely versatile.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
And I'm not sure we talked about this, but there's
no camera on this device.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
That's correct. So it's a choice that was an absolute choice.
Speaker 4 (07:46):
So we really wanted people to be able to enjoy
the Google Assistant giving them help in any room in
their home that they choose. We didn't want them to
have to think about, well, what do I do in
that room? Or who does what in front of the camera.
We wanted to remove all of that friction out of
the thought process. And as a device that's scared to
be able to go in any room in your home,
we thought it best to for this for this first product,
(08:08):
to not have a camera and.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
To enable that when can we get it and how much.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
On shelf ten, twenty two October twenty second for one
hundred and.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
Forty nine dollars.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Okay, Ashton Newdell, thanks so much for joining me on
the podcast again. It's called the Google Home Hub, and
it's a pretty cool device. I've got to say. I've
been playing with it and it kind of is the
missing link between all this Google stuff with the Chrome
Cast and the Google Home and now you've got the
Hub with the screen, and of course your phone in
(08:37):
your pocket, so screens everywhere.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
That's kind of the future of what we're talking about here.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
So if you want to see more on the Google
Home Hub, you can look in the show notes, or
you can go to.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
My website, Rich on tech dot tv. Thanks so much
for listening.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
I'm Rich Damiro.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
I'll talk to you real soon.
Google Smart Speaker gets a screen. It's now called the
Google Home Hub.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
What's going on. I'm Rich Demiro.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Rich on Tech, and joining me today is
Ashton Udahl from Google Home Hub.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
He's a product manager there, and this is a brand
new product. Think of it as a.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Tablet, but with a Google Home built in. This can
go on your counter, it can go next to your bed,
wherever you need a screen combined with the smarts of
Google and all that cool stuff the speaker can do.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Ashton, thanks so much for joining me.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Thanks for having me Rich.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
All right, so let's dive into the Google Home Hub.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
This is a product that we kind of assumed what
happened sooner than later. It kind of mixes the best
of the screen on your phone with the smart speaker
plus Google.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (00:44):
We wanted to build off the early success that our
speaker products had in the market and learn from those
and we went out. We talked to customers to understand
what they really wanted, and we realized that you know,
most of I should say many of Google's most popular
services search, photos, YouTube, calendar, maps.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
All these things leverage a visual interface.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
So we realized that when we built Google Home Hub
and we brought a display into the mix that this
was going to.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Be a really powerful opportunity to help people in their homes.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
So just some nuts and bolts of the device.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
It's got to seven inch screen, no camera, but it
does have a light sensor, which is really handy for
adapting the screen to sort of the different rooms you
might put it in. It's got a speaker, and of
course the display is really important because if you have
this bedside, you want it to function as sort of
maybe a display with pictures during the day, but at
(01:37):
night when you're trying to sleep, you don't want it
to be that busy.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
So tell me what you did for that.
Speaker 4 (01:40):
Yeah, So we wanted this product to be able to
go in any room in the home, and an important
part of doing that is not making people feel like
this was another techie gadget with blue screen light and
blinky lights. So we incorporated a sensor that measures the lighting,
the brightness and the color in your environment, and it
actually emulates.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
That lighting on the display itself. So you want to
set the.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
Mood in the evening, you have light bulb incandescent light
bulbs on, or it gets a little bit darker. We
actually bring down the brightness of the screen and we
match the color temperature so it feels just like another
photo frame around your home.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
And so some of the things you can do with
this device is think, you know, a Google Home speaker,
but with the added ability to kind of see what
you're doing. So let's say you ask for directions somewhere,
It's going to visually show you those directions. Let's say
you want to see your Nest cam outside the front door,
it can visually show you that camera.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
It can control your smart.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Home devices, but not just control, but also has that
missing link of like it can tell you the status
if they're on or off right exactly.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
So one of the things people wanted most was a
sense of control in their homes and smart home devices
they aim to deliver that, but a lot of times
you just feel like you're searching through a lot of
apps and trying to find the right one.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
And it's a bit of a hassle.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
And we wanted to do away with that for people,
so we gave people what's called the Home View. It's
a single interface that's super easy access that you can
see a summary for everything that's going on in your
home and tap right in and control each of those things, and.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Tell me about Obviously, this is going to be something
that people look at pictures on, they watch little video
clips on, see cooking videos, you know, if it's in
the kitchen, you can see you know, how to chop
an onion. Tell me about that screen and kind of
what you envision people viewing on this.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
Yeah, so of course you can get all kinds of
answers powered by Google Search.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
And all kinds of information.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
There. It is right there, it is.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
It sounds pretty good, right, music as well.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
Music streaming media, your favorite shows, sports highlights. It has
YouTube music and you can also set up YouTube TV
on your hub. So this can now become your kitchen
TV on your countertop, taking the latest highlights from your
favorite sports team.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
And it's just really exciting.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
To be able to give people access to so much
content out there via YouTube.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Now, I think the trojan horse of this device is
I mean, obviously a lot of people know about the
Google Home and the speakers. Maybe they're like, oh, I
don't really need that. Perhaps I don't think that's true,
but some people might think that. But with this, the
idea that you can have your photos displayed on this
people like the idea of we take all these digital pictures,
they kind of live on our phones, on our computers.
(04:14):
We don't see them as much as we'd like to write.
So with this you might have the people who adapt
it or adopt it just for the photo ability that
it's going to show ambient pictures throughout the day, right absolutely.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
You know, Google, we make phones with some of the
world leading camera capabilities, but you take lots of pictures
and you realize that they just end up staying on
your phone. As you said, it's really hard to enjoy them.
And so Hub really completes the puzzle here because now
it gives you a great way to consume those photos
around your home. Of course, you can create albums and
(04:48):
stream them to Hub to show your favorite photos, but
we realized that that takes a lot of work, and
people with you know, busy households or families, they don't
often have times to stop and do that. So we
said to ourselves, how about we take all of the
work out of this, and the Google Photos Assistant can
actually pick the photos of the people that you select
and care about most and then automagically stream those to
(05:09):
your Google Home Hub.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
So everybody can enjoy those work free throughout the day.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
So you're talking about a feature called live Albums, and
this takes all the guests work out of sharing pictures
because I can say, here's my two kids. I can
tell the Google Assistant, these are.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
The pictures I'd like stream to.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
My mom's Google Home Hub, and it will actually find
those pictures of my kids that I take and share
them with her exactly.
Speaker 4 (05:31):
So it takes all the work of curating the album
out for you. So you tell the Google Assistant the
people you care about most, and the Google Assistant can
go through your pictures and recognize the best pictures of
those people. It does that by filtering out all the
pictures with poor lighting, blurry motion, eyes closed, and it
picks the best pictures of those and then automatically streams
(05:53):
them as they get updated to your mom's hub.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Now it's interesting because I've noticed in Google Photos that
it highlights pictures that it makes them bigger, the ones
that thinks are the best, right yep, So this is
kind of building upon that. We knew this was kind
of doing that, but now it's actually putting those pictures
in its own little like putting that smart to work.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
Exactly, So it's really making AI work for you by
being able to take your photos and automatically pick the
best ones. Now you can put a hub anywhere in
your home and enjoy those pictures all day long.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
And other things you could do with the hub pretty
standard stuff like make phone calls, look up directions.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
To places, obviously, Google search for just about anything. Is
there anything else we should know about this device?
Speaker 4 (06:38):
You know, I think there's a lot in there. You
mentioned a lot of great ones. It's a great secret
sous chef. It can be your secret weapon in the kitchen.
You can come home and if you just can't think
of what to make, you can actually tell it what
ingredients you have, and it'll suggest great recipes for you
based on those ingredients. So it can take a lot
of the thinking work and guesswork out of the cooking
(06:58):
and the kitchen.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
There's a lot of ways into the device.
Speaker 4 (07:01):
The best thing about it is people generally see a
problem that they want to solve with it, and then
once they get in they get exposed to these other capabilities,
and over time it just gets.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
More and more useful, more and more delightful for people.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Where do you see people putting this in their homes.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
Really, it can go anywhere, and that's what it's designed for.
So of course the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom,
those will probably be the primary places. But the screen
is big enough to enjoy a video, say if you
set it up, you know, in a little bit.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
Further away on a shelf or a side table. You know.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
It can also be small enough to fit on a
small table and say a hallway.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
So really it's extremely versatile.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
And I'm not sure we talked about this, but there's
no camera on this device.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
That's correct. So it's a choice that was an absolute choice.
Speaker 4 (07:46):
So we really wanted people to be able to enjoy
the Google Assistant giving them help in any room in
their home that they choose. We didn't want them to
have to think about, well, what do I do in
that room? Or who does what in front of the camera.
We wanted to remove all of that friction out of
the thought process. And as a device that's scared to
be able to go in any room in your home,
we thought it best to for this for this first product,
(08:08):
to not have a camera and.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
To enable that when can we get it and how much.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
On shelf ten, twenty two October twenty second for one
hundred and.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
Forty nine dollars.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Okay, Ashton Newdell, thanks so much for joining me on
the podcast again. It's called the Google Home Hub, and
it's a pretty cool device. I've got to say. I've
been playing with it and it kind of is the
missing link between all this Google stuff with the Chrome
Cast and the Google Home and now you've got the
Hub with the screen, and of course your phone in
(08:37):
your pocket, so screens everywhere.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
That's kind of the future of what we're talking about here.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
So if you want to see more on the Google
Home Hub, you can look in the show notes, or
you can go to.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
My website, Rich on tech dot tv. Thanks so much
for listening.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
I'm Rich Damiro.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
I'll talk to you real soon.
Host
Rich DeMuro
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