Google Home, a year later, lacks some core Google skills

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham says Google Home is improved but is still a work in progress with some gaping holes. That's how it was pitched in its sneak peek demo at the Google I/O 2016 developer conference. But when it was released to the public in November, it didn't turn out that way. Many of the features didn't work as promised, and critics were mixed. The $129 speaker had potential, USA TODAY's Edward Baig and others said, though it was clearly playing catch up to Amazon's Alexa and the Echo speaker.