Meet Google Home Mini.
It’s Google Home, But Smaller.
Today (October 3rd, 2017) by a series of accidents on the Walmart website, the Google Home Mini was prematurely announced. The Google Home Mini is a Voice First device for the Google Assistant selling at $49 retail price. The Google Home Mini is just 4.53 x 4.53 x 4.72 inches and weighs less than .85 pounds. They say that it is:
“The powerful little helper that gives you answers to questions, controls your smart home, shares weather info, and even plays music.”
The Google Home Mini is clearly a response to the Amazon Echo Dot. The price point of the Echo Dot is $39.95 and will likely be brought down to $19.95 during the holiday shopping season of 2017. Walmart is also running a promotion with Google Express that cuts the price of the Home Mini down to just $24 using a $25 discount on any items ordered with the service through January 15th.
Voice Commerce Leads The Voice First Revolution
There will be a very aggressive promotion of the Google Home Mini at Walmart and at their recently acquired Jet e-commecre company. The power of the Jet platform and Google Home Mini is one of the most important aspects of the future of Google Home. Voice Commerce is perhaps one of the most critical aspects of any successful Voice First platform and Google is starting from a weaker position but also a laggard position. Google had the opportunity to define the Voice First market as did Apple, yet maladvice and listening to the wrong advice and vision has both companies in catch-up mode.
There is no pay-per-click advertising in the Voice First world and the Google Home Mini with Walmart is an attempt to gain equal footing with Amazon. I wrote about the Google quagmire last year in Forbes [1] and although this relationship is important, there will be much more needed to allow Google to catch up. We are at a point where there are about 12 Voice Commerce experts in the world in 2017, the world needs over 1,000 today.
More Human Culture Less Engineering Culture
We will see and hear a lot more about the Google Home Mini tomorrow and perhaps the high fidelity Google Home Max also. We will hear a great deal about AI and how Google is leading in AI. We will see a more advanced version of the Google Assistant. All of this is good and needed. However for Google to catch up to and pass by Amazon in Voice First leadership, and out think the 5,000 person Alexa army, hopefully Google will begin to transform. The transformation is beyond the much triumphed “engineering culture”. The transformation will come by understanding the shift to human culture assisted by engineers. This is hopefully what we see more of from Google on October 4th, 2017.
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[1] Voice-first-technology-is-about-to-kill-advertising-as-we-know-it
