Meet Essential Home: an alternative to Amazon Echo and Google Home

Andy Rubin’s Essential Products has revealed a new device that goes head to head with Amazon’s Alexa-powered speakers and the Google Home. Called the Essential Home, it’s basically a digital assistant for your house that is equipped with a round screen and can be activated with a question, a tap, and even a glance.

So, what exactly does it do? Well, it allows you to control your music, set timers, and control your lights, among other things. Of course, you can also ask it a bunch of different questions and it should provide you with an answer right away.

It basically does more or less the same thing as its competitors. However, the company does claim that the device is a lot more focused on privacy. Unlike the Google Home and Amazon Echo, for example, which work by sending your data to a remote server, the Essential Home is designed to talk to devices over your in-home network in order to limit sending data to the cloud.

Unfortunately, a lot of the details regarding the device remain a mystery for now. The company hasn’t announced how much it will retail for and when it will be available. It hasn’t even shared any real-life images of the Essential Home, but it did post a few renders online that show the device in action.

The demand for devices like the Essential Home is increasing, so it’s no wonder that more companies are entering the market. According to a recent report by eMarketer, Amazon’s Alexa-powered devices are way ahead of the competition when it comes to sales. They are expected to claim a 70.6 percent share of the US market in 2017, followed by the Google Home with a market share of 23.8 percent.