Google's 'Helpful Home' strategy is leaning on AI to make homes anticipate consumers' wants and needs

At its Made By Google event yesterday, the search giant announced a number of new products and services to build on its "Helpful Home" smart home concept. AI-powered systems like Google Assistant are at the heart of this strategy, tying together a range of tools and services from first- and third-party brands to create new means of controlling the home and to allow Google to automate and anticipate the wants and needs of consumers at home. Here's what Google announced for the smart home: Despite the event being nominally about its hardware, the overriding takeaway from these announcements is that Google's underlying AI is far more central to its home strategy, especially relative to Amazon. Google's portfolio of first-party hardware for smart speakers and the smart home pales in comparison to Amazon, its chief rival in the space in the US and Europe. That's because Google seems intent to use its hardware to be smarter about getting inputs and information from users, rather than surrounding the user with a flood of devices. Google's approach emphasizes to the consumer that the AI is doing more of the heavy lifting and "inhabiting" the home in unseen ways.