Google seems to be very aggressively pushing Google Home Mini devices lately. eBay just ran a promo where you get one for free with $150 purchase site-wide, and Google Shopping Express is running something similar with a lower $125 purchase requirement.
Does Google have too many inventories on hand, or do they really, really want people to put one in their homes no matter what the cost?
Voice interfaces are likely to be a big part of our future, and in order to have the best voice ML tech, you need a ton of real-world data. I wouldn’t be overly surprised to see them pay people to have/use these things.
I agree on the land grab. But for data, powers of ten are what we're talking about. Accents, regional phrasing, idioms, and mixing different languages together.
The models are moderately good at basic speech to text and some grammatical parsing. But there is a lot more to go. The simplicity of the command set isn't an indicator of their aspirations. You'd eventually want a system capable of understanding any utterance by any human, at least as good as any other human. And certainly not just in command syntax.
Maybe it's just the mid-level clothing retailer model? The MSRP is priced higher but you can almost always get it on "sale" so you think you're getting a good deal?
They're super commodity hardware -- tust a WiFi chip, a speaker, a mic, and some other off-the-shelf components. It seems like the profit margins would be high at full retail price. Remember that the tech companies don't care about recouping their R&D costs, they just want to get these things into homes essentially at cost. Economies of scale really kick into play when you're making millions.
You can get a vendor lock-in effect. "Google when's my flight?" data extracted from gmail. Although I don't think they make much money from gmail, so ??
I'm not sure why this was voted down, it's this the obvious goal of these devices? Get people to accept voice-control in the home? For now they are woken up by a wake word, but as people become more comfortable with them, this restriction is relaxed in the name of "convenience".
Does Google have too many inventories on hand, or do they really, really want people to put one in their homes no matter what the cost?