The latest retro-style smart speakers from JBL are the first to house Google’s and Amazon’s voice assistants in one place for simultaneous use — something Sonos was never able to achieve.
Announced at the IFA tech show in Berlin this week, Harman’s new JBL Authentics 200 ($329.99), Authentics 500 ($699.99), and the portable Authentics 300 ($429.99) speakers come with both Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant on board. And for the first time on any smart speaker, you can invoke either assistant at any time. This means you can ask Alexa to play your “Sounds of the ’80s” playlist and then your roommate can ask Google to stop it.
Google and Amazon have a long history of not playing well together — there’s still no native YouTube app on Echo Show devices, and neither company’s music streaming service works on the other’s smart speakers. But the Cold War may be thawing. First, they’ve been working together on Matter, the new smart home standard. Now, they are bringing their voice assistants together in a way that should benefit users.
“[You] can ask either Alexa or Google Assistant to stop certain tasks — music that’s playing, a timer that’s going off, an alarm — and the activity will stop, regardless of which assistant actually initiated that activity,” Aaron Rubenson, vice president of Alexa at Amazon, told The Verge in an interview.
While the assistants aren’t linked to each other — you have to set them up separately using JBL’s app — they are “aware” of each other thanks to a Multi-Agent Experience (MAX) Toolkit that enables features like controlling each other’s timers and music and also knowing when to let the other one talk.
“We enabled an audio focus software so that Alexa and Google Assistant would not speak over each other,” Marissa Chacko, director of product management for Google Assistant for Home, told me (in the same joint interview!). “If someone uses Google to start streaming music, and a timer goes off, set with Alexa, we let the music duck so the timer can be heard,” said Amazon’s Rubenson.
All of this means that if you live in a multi-assistant household, you don’t have to remember which assistant you or someone in your house asked to start something; either assistant can control it.
This also applies to smart home devices, although you still need to set up your lights, locks, etc. separately in each platform — making this only marginally different from what you can do today. I can already ask Alexa to turn on my Lutron lights in my living room and Google to turn them off. But I need two speakers in the room to do that. With the new JBL speakers, just one would suffice. However, an Echo Pop and a Nest Mini combined cost under $90, much less than the cheapest JBL offering.