Google home french services are not what I was expecting

Christmas has come and left me a present, a little box shaped like an egg.

It is the promise of a wonderful world,and of interaction with a virtual friend which can answer all your questions.

We unpack the mysterious object, we download the Google home app and here we go.

OK Google what is the weather like today in London? OK Google tell me a joke, OK Google what is a adverbial phrase of time? OK Google wake me up at 8 tomorrow…

However, after having asked every questions we could possibly imagine, we quickly run out of ideas.

Therefore, we try to go further by getting to know our new friend, who will soon become our servant.

Great, I have a Spotify account! I can listen to music. I also have a chromecast, I can pop up some stuff on my TV.

So, listening to music with a Google mini turns into torture, but for £39, we cannot ask for the moon.

I run to the nearest shop to buy an audio chromecast in order to control my speaker from my Google home.

Here we are, I just had my first steps into home automation and I am not going to stop here. I hurry to buy connected light bulbs to change the lighting atmosphere just by talking to my new friend. Specific brands are too expensive for me, so I quickly decide to take a discount one on Ali Baba for £7. I have to wait a few weeks to control my lighting. In the meantime, I try, in vain, to build a friendship with my so called, ‘new friend’.

I want to interact with the whole world, to access every service, I want a personal aid available 24h/24, 7days/7, to fulfill all my desires and caprices. I want to be able to access personal contents, I want a real friendship, I want it to remember me, to catch up on my news, to take an initiative, to inform me, to entertain me… I want a personal assistant and not a computer-generated voice that only reads the first answer find on internet.

But by miracle, Google has thought about everything and I have a bunch of third services at my disposal.

However, where are these freaking vocal app that are supposed to change my life? My first task is to find them. We search for them in Google. No answer. In Google play. Still no answer. There are two apps on my phone: Google home and Google assistant. The two of them offer ideas of apps, but where is the list of apps?

By looking deeper and clicking on an icon with a lack of meaning on top of the Google app I eventually find the list. It is divided into 17 sections.

I summon my courage and begin to look at them section by section. And then, I discover the tragic truth: there exist no more than 5 apps per section ! That is to say, barely a hundred apps. We are really from the thousands of apps present on Alexa’s store in the US.

The quality is not much better. Indeed, apart from a few sophisticated apps, most of them hardly offer services and do not really start a conversation. None of them memorise the context of our talk and I have to systematically repeat the same thing multiple times. Even worse, a big majority of the given services are just opportunistic apps which take advantage of the store’s poverty in order to highlight their brands that does not have much to offer.

Let’s try to stay positive! Services are going to improve and expand. New apps are going to appear with a real savoir-faire. We are at the beginning of a new era. It is the moment to make the most of this no mans land to conquer new markets, to invent new interactions, to start having a real friendship with a future client.

Alice CMO @ shirklab

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