We’re probably getting third-party Google Home speakers

At Google I/O, Google unveiled their answer to the Amazon Echo family and its Alexa platform. It’s Google Home, a smart speaker powered by Google Assistant that you can issue commands to and it’ll take the appropriate action, whether that’s sending a message, controlling your smart home, playing music, helping you book a movie ticket, or what have you.

Well, a new rumor out of Variety claims to confirm that Google Home will not just be driven on Google’s own hardware, with the company supposedly working with third-party manufacturers to get it into more products.

This isn’t all that surprising, if true. Not only does Amazon offer their Alexa services up for third-party devices, Google has been doing the same for, well, almost all their products. We’ve already seen it in the form of Google Cast and the many speakers by the likes of LG, Vizio, and Sony. Why can’t those speakers also act as Google Home speakers?

That’s not to say current Google Cast speakers or even future ones will no doubt add Google Home support, but the precedence and Google’s own history tells us that the notion Google will license the goods out to as many manufacturers as they can is not at all out of the question. The only questions are who, when, and how.

Amazon hasn’t been especially successful in getting others to build Alexa devices, so Google has a great opportunity to leapfrog the online retailer despite being so late to the party. We’ll hope to hear more October 4th.