CEO of Nest Tony Fadell suggested that Google is planning to develop its own voice-controlled personal assistant device in rival to Amazon's Echo.
According to a report from The Information, stating that the Nest CEO was devoted in making the smart thermostat to meet its performance expectation after Google's acquisition to the company for $3.2 billion back in 2014.
Google's ownership to Nest is not enough to help the search giant in terms of building to make reference to what's being called as the rival to Amazon Echo. Although Google's attempt to pursue such venture shows plenty of reasons to do so, considering that the smart home division sees major potential in the tech landscape, where Amazon has already taken the lead with its Echo range of smart devices.
Amazon Echo is a progressively known consumer device that allows people to use voice command to take control of different devices and services in their house, which the device implies the use of Amazon's Alexa, a voice-controlled personal digital assistant offering consumers to play and control audio from different music streaming services using voice-command. The devices can also read audio books, report local news, weather, business and more information.
The device took off slowly, being sold in the market at a price of $179, then the product started gaining momentum which it lead to become a sleeper hit in 2015 in the wireless speaker market. Where also last year, Amazon attempted to sell the Echo that was considered the best seller product across all $100+ product category on Black Friday 2015.
As of now, Google doesn't hold a product to challenge the Echo, but if the company decides to release a product as similar as the Echo, then that would give a way to expand the company's footprint in the smart home segment.
