Google Home Welcomes A Dozen New Smart Home Partners To Battle Amazon Echo

Companies are embracing the smart home movement in a number of fun and creative ways. Thanks to smart home speakers and technologies, you can bark out commands to the cloud to do things like dim the lights, play music, look up the weather, and even order a pizza. Amazon hopped out in front of the trend with its Echo speaker and Alexa digital assistant, but here comes Google with its Google Home speaker. In a bid to be more competitive, Google has added a dozen new partners to its smart home initiative.


These new home automation integrations introduced with the latest update add a wealth of functionality to Google Home powered by the company's Google Assistant. Here is a look at the list of players that have been added to the fray:

• Anova
• August
• Best Buy Insignia
• First Alert
• Frigidaire
• Geeni
• Lifx
• Logitech Harmony
• Rachio
• TP-Link
• Vivint
• Wink

These added players extend the capabilities of Googles smart home speaker. Starting with "Okay Google," users can now do things like "turn on the fan" with the Best Buy Insignia Wi-Fi Smart Plug or "change the living room lights to blue" with Lifx, to name a couple of examples.

This is a nice expansion, especially when you consider that Google Home launched launch November with just four supported platforms—IFFT, Nest, Philips Hue, and SmartThings. It's added several more since then, such as Honeywell and Belkin, but today's additions really help to flesh out the platform. Whether this brings parity between Google Home and Amazon Echo is up for debate, but the good news for Google is its platform is now much more interesting.

Google said it plans to add more partners in the future but did not say which ones.