Google I/O: Google Home will now let you make voice calls, catching up to Alexa

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham says Google Home is improved but is still a work in progress with some gaping holes. LOS ANGELES -- Google announced new features for its Google Home personal assistant product Wednesday, with one key catch-up to rival Amazon -- free phone calls to the United States and Canada mobile and landline phones. Google Home, which is a distant No. 2 in the personal digital assistant speaker market to Amazon's Echo speaker line, announced many new tools for the Home that tap into the Google Assistant. The assistant is Google's answer to Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Samsung's Bixby and looks to use voice computing for both search and daily tasks. In Google's vision of the utopian world, we would use Google Home to answer basic search questions.