Google announced that its Assistant is now on over 1 billion devices around the world. That kind of widespread usage for a virtual assistant is great for the Mountain View tech giant but they aren’t stopping anytime soon. It’s almost been two years since be started seeing Bluetooth headsets equipped with Google’s virtual assistant and we could see many more of these on the horizon. Google teamed up with Qualcomm to design an easy to work with, customizable devkit for OEMs who want to create a smart headset with the Google Assistant.
Google has done a lot of work to bring its assistant to a plethora of secondary devices. Most people are using this service on their smartphone and that has been key for the company. Not everyone wants to buy a Nest Hub Max or even a Google Home/Home Mini to use the Google Assistant while they are walking around. Having this feature embedded into Bluetooth earbuds and headsets has made the feature more convenient and it makes more sense from a business standpoint too.
More people are going to buy earbuds or headphones than a secondary device to bring the Google Assistant to convenient spots. This collaboration between Google and Qualcomm will benefit both companies as well as some Bluetooth headset makers who opt into using the Qualcomm Smart Headset Platform. This platform is based on the QCC5100 series Bluetooth audio SoC and gives manufacturers the building blocks needed to create a smart headset with the Google Assistant.
Google went as far as to build a Qualcomm Smart Headset Reference Design which delivers high-quality audio, noise cancellation capabilities, and supports extended battery life and playback time. There’s not any word on when any of this will be made available to manufacturers, but having all of this technology packed into an off-the-shelf chip from Qualcomm will surely help drive down the cost of these fully featured Bluetooth headsets.
This new audio chip supports Google’s Fast Pair feature and offers the following specs:
https://developers.googleblog.com/2019/05/assistant-at-io19.html
TweakTech 