Washington - Smart home hubs are continuing to evolve, and
Google just added a pretty important feature to its own hub, the Google Home.
Previously, Home only linked up to the account of whoever
set it up first. Now, the device will be able to handle multiple accounts and
tell who's speaking to it, offering personalized answers to some questions.
That's a feature that Amazon's Echo doesn't have. And it's
important for a voice assistant that's designed to run your household. For an
assistant such as Siri, which lives on devices used by just one person,
multi-account support isn't as important. But home hubs sit in a central
location and operate things such as your lights or your thermostat that
everyone will want to be able to control.
Being able to identify an individual's voice may also help
cut down on some unwanted surprises. Google said in a statement that the new
feature makes it so that "only you would be able to shop via Google Home.
“So others - i.e, your kids or an intelligent parrot -
shouldn't be able to tell Home to buy something on your account. That avoids
instances like one in San Diego this January when Amazon Echo units started
ordering dollhouses after hearing a news anchor said "Alexa ordered me a
dollhouse."
Google Home, right, sits on display near a Pixel phone following a product event, in San Francisco. Google’s voice-activated assistant can now recognize who’s talking to it on the Google’s Home speaker. AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File
The anchor was reporting on a story about - what else? - A
child buying something without permission on the Echo. (Amazon chief executive
Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
That said, the company also noted the voice feature isn't
yet foolproof. "We're just getting started and we won't be perfect,"
the statement said. "We don't recommend that users rely upon voice
identification as a security feature."
While there are benefits to having home hubs distinguish
different voices, there are also some privacy implications to think about.
Consumers worried about their voice data being collected in general should
think twice before picking up a home hub, said Bradley Shear, of the
privacy-focused, Maryland-based Shear Law.
With this new feature, he said, it's worth keeping in mind
that Google will have even more specific information about you, which could be
used in ways that consumers may not realize - particularly if it's combined
with other information tied to your Google account.
Consumers should also think about how this information could
be used outside of the company, Shear said. He pointed to a recent murder case
in Arkansas where police asked Amazon for audio recorded from the suspect's
home hub, the Echo. (Amazon originally fought the order before the suspect
agreed to share the information.) Shear said that case illustrated how
recordings made in your home may end up being used in unexpected ways.
"It has a clean voiceprint from you," Shear said,
speaking of the new feature. "Once something is digitized, you don't know
where it could end up."
After all, while both Google Home and Alexa devices only
collect voice data when you use their respective wake phrases -
"Alexa," "Ok Google" or "Hey Google" - anyone who
owns one of these devices also knows that they can sometimes trigger by
accident.
That opens up the potential for comments you make in private
to be taken out of context or shared to an audience you never intended,
particularly if the recording can be definitively identified as your voice.
(Users can wipe their voice recordings from their Google accounts, per the
company's privacy policy.)
From a usability standpoint, there are also some problems
with these hubs that identifying individuals by voice can't fix. This won't
solve the "Burger King" problem of commercials being able to trigger
the Google Home through your television. Anyone in range of the Google Home
will still be able to use its non-personalized features.
Read also: Google says Allo to new smart home tech
So even if you don't create an account for your guests or
your children, they'll still be able to ask it to do things such as answer
questions, set timers, or play videos on a Chromecast.
To set up the new feature, users will have to hop in to the
Google Home app, which should have a new option for "multi-user"
support on any connected Google Home connected to your network. Home owners can
add up to six accounts, according to a company blog post.
Google Home owners will have to teach the hub how to
identify their voices by saying "Ok Google" and "Hey
Google" twice into the device, when prompted. This allows it to learn
different characteristics of each person's voice.
This kind of training should be familiar to anyone who uses
Siri, or the voice assistant on Google's phones - the key difference being that
you'll have to go through it multiple times on Home, depending on how many
accounts you want to hook up.
Google said that it will use its network to "compare
the sound of your voice to its previous analysis so we can understand if it's
you speaking or not." The company promises this should only take a few
milliseconds.
The feature is rolling out to all US users starting
Thursday. Google said it also plans to bring this feature to the United Kingdom
in "the coming months."
WASHINGTON POST