The Google Home Hub is a cute, little home control center

[MUSIC] So Google Smart Display is real. This is it. It's called the Google Home Hub, and look at this thing. It's so small it could fit in the palm of my hand. We've seen similar tech as Google Assistant is built into smart displays from Lenovo to JBL. [MUSIC] But Google really tried to streamline the approach here and they have a few new tricks. So like the smart display from Lenovo and JBL you can use your voice to control your smart home, add something to your calendar, search something from the web. It can show you personal photos, you can watch Watch videos. You can listen to music. My favorite feature of those is here too, which is recipe assistance. Ask for help cooking, say chicken tikka masala, and you can go through the ingredients one-by-one. You can go through the steps one-by-one. And Google will save your place if you wanna multi-task. Google Assistant is built-in here, the same assistant you get on your Google Home. And it works really well on smart displays.. Google uses the screen to show you more info about the weather, about local restaurants, so you get an assistant who interacts with you visually as well. So the new stuff. First of all, there is no camera on this thing. You can make video calls but they'd be one way video calls. The reason for that is Google wants you to be able to put this on your night stand and places in your home where you might not want a camera. Instead, this little guy is an RGB light sensor. What that allows it to do is, if you're looking at videos, or you're on an ambient screen with a clock, and the light in your room changes, the screen will adapt so it's not blaring at you. They said they wanted to do away with the billboard effect. Google is also debuting live albums, which helps the assistant sort through your pictures by place or by person. So if you take new pictures of your kids and you want that album showing on your smart display, it'll automatically pop up there as part of your running slideshow. But my favorite new feature? This thing is really good at controlling your smart home. You could always do it with your voice, and on Lenovo and JBL you'd see a little display you could control. This one, if you slide down, there are your smart Smart home controls. Quick and easy for turning off your lights, it knows I'm in the kitchen, so it's got the kitchen light right there. And then it has an option to broadcast a message, it has an option to check on my smart cameras. Again, you can do that all via voice. But this one's making it a lot easier to control your smart home with a touch. Google is not leaving it's smartest play partners in the dust here, apparently it's rolling out its new features such as these smart home controls to the devices from JBL and Lenovo as well. But Google wanted to create a one-stop-shop for controlling anything with your voice or with a touch. And Google Home Hub might fit that bill. It's due out later this month for $150, which is a nice price, and it looks nice enough and cute enough that you might want to put it in any room in your house. And I'm excited to test it out. [BLANK_AUDIO]