Google Home

To further your smart home experience, Google is constantly improving the Google Home speaker with new features additions. And, it now seems that the tech giant is working on a fix for one of the biggest problems with the smart speaker. Users have been complaining about only being able to log in with a single account, which is probably going to change very soon.

In an app teardown of the latest Google Home update, Android Police has spotted references suggesting multi-user support may be in the works. This is being speculated because of the presence of a couple of empty strings in the APK code for the said application. These strings act as placeholders for new features Google is currently developing and contain ‘mu’ prefix, thus, acting as evidence for multi-user feature development.

This means the tech giant is looking to soon provide you with an option to add multiple accounts from the Google Home app. But, it is also expected to bring into the mix the ability to “recognize your voice” — currently one of the biggest feature limitations of such smart speakers. This will further require the need for training, which has also been referenced in the app code. This means Google Home is soon going to be able to switch users, maintaining different data pools, by simply identifying who’s speaking at the moment.

While there are references to multi-user support in the app code, there is no word on how soon Google plans to implement the feature.

Further, this development comes on the heels of Amazon recently acknowledging that it is working on multiple voice recognition for Alexa. It has been working to distinguish between different user voices since last summer and this capability is now in the final stages of testing. The company is currently pushing through a handful of implementation issues and plans to differentiate itself as the better voice assistant soon.

But, Google, as seen above, is aggressively working to up the ante. The smart home speaker who’ll  emerge as the winner after a bitter competition still remains a mystery. The said speaker wars are soon expected to be joined by Microsoft’s Cortana and Line’s Clova AI assistant as well. So, well, it is sure to become an over-crowded market in a little while.

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