“Hey Google, Buy Me a Dollhouse”
Launched back last year, the Google Home speaker is the direct competitor to Amazon’s Alexa. While Alexa has an edge over Google Home due to its robust integration with third-party products and services, Google has lately been doing its best to fill up the gap by steadily adding support for new services and introducing new features.
Now in an attempt to catch up with Amazon Alexa’s shopping feature, Google has added new useful functionality which will let you shop for things using Google Assistant on your Google Home speaker. That means you will be able to order a variety of products by just issuing a simple command to your Google Home speaker — for example, if you want to buy, say, paper towels, just say: “Ok Google, order paper towels” to Google Home and your order will be placed.
Though before you start shopping with the Google Home, you’ll need to add your payment and delivery address details in the Google Home app. To do so, open up the Home app, go to ‘More Settings’ then ‘Payments’ and fill in your default credit card details along with your delivery address.
After setting up the Google Home app, you can start shopping from more than 50 national and locally available Google Express partner stores including Costco, Whole Foods Market, Walgreens, PetSmart, Bed Bath & Beyond and more.
The feature seemingly only works on the Google Home speaker as of now, though it’s quite possible that we’ll have this feature added to Google Assistant on mobile as well in near future. There is no extra fee through April 30, 2017 when ordering with Google Home, which also hints that Google may start charging for placing orders with Home after that period.
So the next time you want to buy something, rather than firing up a shopping website or app to order it, you may just want to ask your smart speaker to order it for you. After all, it’s all about convenience.
