Amazon Alexa take note! Affordable Google Home, Home Mini speakers launched

Taking on Amazon's Alexa-powered smart speakers, Google on Tuesday unveiled its voice-activated the 'Home' and 'Home Mini' speakers in India that can help people with their commute, play favourite songs and videos, plan daily schedule and lots more.

Powered by Google's artificial intelligence-based Assistant, the 'Home' and 'Home Mini' are priced at Rs 9,999 and Rs 4,499, respectively. The speakers will go on sale via Flipkart and at over 750 retail stores.

"These products have been customised to match the needs of the Indian consumer and you will see that Google 'Home' is truly 'desi'. These understand Indian accents and will respond with uniquely Indian contexts," said Rishi Chandra, Vice President of Product Management and General Manager of Home Products, Google.

While the Home Mini got two colour variants -- chalk and charcoal --, the Google Home would be available only in chalk colour and the coral colour variant would be added later.

Home-grown e-commerce platform Flipkart has partnered with Google to offer the Home and Home Mini speakers with free JioFi router, along with special offers on music subscriptions.

"When buying a Google Home at Reliance Digital or MyJio stores, you get a free JioFi router with 100GB of high-speed 4G data (worth Rs 2,499),", said the company in a statement.

In terms of design and features, the top surface of the speakers has LEDs that light up when Google Home recognises "OK Google" voice command.

Google Home features dual microphones, which utilise neural beam forming technology to enable accurate far-field voice recognition.

Google has simulated hundreds of thousands of noisy environments and applied Machine Learning (ML) to recognise patterns that allow it to filter and separate speech from noise.

Amazon India