Amazon, after a report in Bloomberg revealed that some employees can access users' Alex recordings, has become the de facto villain of smart home privacy, while Apple has long positioned itself as our would-be saviour. Lurking between the two in a hazily-defined space, however, is Google.
Google Home, Google Assistant and Nest, as of today, all merged into one smart home brand named Google Nest, are the closest rival to Amazon’s Alexa in terms of sales and ecosystem. Now, Google Nest is looking to match the Amazon Echo line, and succeed where Facebook’s Portal bombed, with its own camera-equipped smart display.
The £219 Google Nest Hub Max is essentially an oversized version of last year’s seven-inch Google Home Hub (now rebranded the Nest Hub). It has a larger, 10-inch 1,280 x 800 pixel resolution display that Google says is smudge-proof, the same ‘floating’ design and an audio upgrade thanks to stereo speakers and a rear-facing subwoofer.
Google Nest UK product manager Ed Kenney says that, despite the Max moniker, the sound here is closer to what you’d get from a Google Home than a Home Max. In our demo, though, the Nest Hub Max is a noticeable improvement on the dinky Nest Hub when it comes to music. It's both louder and has a warmer sound. This should fill a kitchen where the Nest Hub struggled.
The Nest Hub works neatly in say, a small kitchen with two friends using it for podcasts, BBC 6Music and Jamie Oliver recipes. The Nest Hub Max is obviously built for families in larger homes, with larger kitchens and more connected devices to control and view.
Also present and correct: two far-field mics to pick up Google Assistant voice commands from across the room and an Ambient EQ sensor to match the lighting in the room. It plays music, videos, shows you recipes and who’s at the door, plus you can keep an eye on and control Google Assistant products around the home.
Google says that one in seven of its Google Home sales last year were Home Hub/Nest Hub devices. One highlight, at least for many privacy-inclined tech reviewers, compared to the Amazon Echo Show and in the wake of the poorly received Facebook Portal smart display/camera, was precisely the fact that there was no camera or insistence on the video-calling use case. Nest connected security cameras have been on sale since 2015, but the Google Nest Hub Max is the first real pitch from Google to sell us a hub device with a camera on the front.
Lionel Guicherd-Callin, product lead for Google Nest, explains that “this is a Nest Cam”, just with slightly reduced features. On the front of the Nest Hub Max, it’s a 6MP sensor with a wide 127-degree field of view. You can stream to either the Google Home or Nest app, with access to five days of continuous recording, and sign up to Nest Aware (£4 a month, £40 a year) for features such as Home and Away Assist. But there’s no night vision, no cloud-based facial recognition as Guicherd-Callin says this is more a “peace of mind” camera than a full-blown security camera as you might put near the front door.
On the Google side, it means Google Duo video calling from the device with auto framing for one person or a group, that works well zooming in and out to frame us correctly in the demo, and replying to video messages with your own quick video messages. (There are a few teething problems such as YouTube Music unexpectedly resuming as the Duo video call ended). The camera can also recognise hand gestures such as holding out your hand to stop whatever YouTube is playing, for instance.
The big new feature, though, is Face Match. It works like Google’s brilliantly executed Voice Match on Google Assistant devices. Like Voice Match, it’s also opt-in, available for up to six people and requires you to take three selfies from different angles in order for Google to build a profile. This initial face data is processed in the cloud then the actual subsequent facial recognition is handled locally on the Nest Hub Max. The camera takes a few frames of video to do so, similar to how an Amazon Echo or Google Home is listening in snippets of a few seconds for the wake words. And like Voice Match, Google uses this to serve you personal results, alerts, commute and calendar notifications or flight information on the screen. Kenney says Face Match is designed to take the smart display away from “pure reactivity”, i.e. users requesting information.
Depending on your personal privacy philosophy, this might sound like a dream home or a surveillance nightmare. Google has stuck a mic/camera on-off switch on the back of the Nest Hub Max and there’s a green light next to the camera when it is on as well as an onscreen icon to show the camera is off. It’s all software, there’s no physical shutter.
As part of the new Google Nest rebrand, Google is trying to encourage Nest customers to move to one Google account to control all Nest and Google devices this summer. This would do away with the pairing process between Google accounts and Nest thermostats and doorbells – which will be rebranded at a later date – and Google is pointing to advantages such as two-factor authentication, detecting suspicious log-ins and having a single developer program as reasons people might switch.
The result of these efforts will be that Google brings more Nest customers – and their personal and behavioural data – into its main Assistant-powered smart home ecosystem. Lionel Guicherd-Callin took pains to note that Google is “transparent about our data collection and there is no data sale to third parties” as well as pointing to Google’s tools to review and remove personal data.
Of course, when you’re a company with the size and reach of Google, legitimate concerns about the use of personal, in-home data aren’t limited to sharing or selling data to third parties but in fact sharing amongst its own businesses. Google has done everything it can to present a privacy-positive approach, while still being Google. Indeed, the company itself blundered back in March when, during an update to the connected home section of its online Google Store, it accidentally leaked the existence of the new Nest Hub Max.
Amazon hasn’t broken out sales of the Echo Show, its smart display with a camera, to date and Facebook is its own peculiar data disaster when it comes to public perception. But it’s possible that a well-designed, feature packed, Google-branded Hub, with a camera and face recognition, might give the smart home product-buying public pause, even with the Nest brand to soften the impact.
The Google Nest Hub Max goes on sale on 15 July for £219 in the UK, from the Google Store, John Lewis, Currys and Argos, and for €229 in Europe. The Google Nest Hub, without a camera, is getting a price cut to £119 and the Google Home’s new price will be £89. The Google Home Mini remains £49.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
