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What's good?
Brian Tong here and welcome to Googlicious for everything Google you can think of and the big story this week, the Google Home Max is finally on sale and available to ship out immediately At a few retailers like the Google Play Store, Best Buy, and Verizon.
Now this is Google's push into the smart home speaker with big sound, and CNET's own Andrew Gebhart got a first look at the final release version, so let's take a look at his video.
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We're taking a look at the premium new version of Google Home's smart speaker called the Google Home Max.
Just like the Google Home, Google Home Max has Google assistant built in.
Meaning you can say, Hey Google what's the weather?
Right now in Mountain View it's 61 and partly cloudy.
Today it will be partly cloudy with a forecasted high of 63 and a low of 43.
And it will answer your questions, it'll control your Smart Home, you can set a timer, you can do all the other things we've come to know with the Google Home Speaker.
The plus with the Google Home Max is that it has a very advanced speaker in it.
So if you were an audiophile, if you really like Sound quality, you can use this to blast the music of your choice and make it sound beautiful to your ears.
So we haven't gotten to fully test it yet, but we're here at Google's headquarters in Mountainview and got to hear a little bit of it, and got to see some of its cool, new tricks.
Such as the fact that you can play a song in stereo, pairing two of the speakers.
You can of course, pair them to any of the other speakers with Chromecast like you could do with a Google Home.
But, this This speaker will both adapt to the room its in and adapt its sound accordingly, but more than that it will play in stereo on its own, using its left and right side accordingly.
You can flip it on its side and it'll turn into just a monospeaker, so all that is pretty cool if you're particular about how you like to listen to music.
As a demo Hey Google, sing me Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
Twinkle twinkle little star--
And it's coming out of both speakers in stereo sound.
Hey Google, that's sweet but stop.
So we're excited to give this
You're so sweet to say that.
The Google Home Max will be available for $399 on December 11th.
So, there'll be a premium gift out there for the audio file in your life.
Thanks, Andrew.
And I know what you're all thinking.
399 is a lot.
You're right.
It's not for everyone, but there are people who are going to get this.
And it's a more versatile and smarter speaker with big sound.
So we'll just have to see how it stacks up to the competition over time.
All right, in other news in the Google Home world, according to the THe verge, the Google Home Mini will be bring play and pause controls back to the device.
That's after Android place discover the touch controls could end up recording you non-stop and the feature is pull before a shift.
A long press on either side where the volumes are will now bring play and pause functionality back so that's a good thing.
And it's time to have more fun with your photo.
Google's research team is releasing three new apps for Android and iOS.
They are built on their own experimental technology to take advantage of the recent advancements in computer vision tech.
And they lovingly call them appsperimentals.
Appserimentals, like get like apps and experimental.
It's almost as good as Brangolina and Bennifer back in the day, like like almost.
All right StoryBoard for android, first of all transforms you videos into a single page comic book layout entirely on the device.
That's a cool app to checkout.
Selfissimo is for android and IOS.
Think of it as an automated selfie photographer that shoots black and white photos and gives you a contact sheet of them And Scrubbies for iOS lets you physically change the speed and direction of a video playback to create these fun loops.
It's like boomerang that you can control with your fingers.
All three are available now and are using tech that is under active research, so google say's performance may vary but these are fun tools to play around with.
And if you aren't getting sucked into the hype machine yet or honestly you're just trying to avoid as much of the Star Wars Last Jedi news as possible, so you don't get spoiled.
You can have with Google Pixel 2's AR sticker that just launched with Star Wars and Stranger Things and they're pretty money.
They are built into the Pixel camera app and you'll need Android 8.1 Oreo to get them.
But I won't lie, I'm gonna mess with this stuff A lot.
All right that's gonna do for this week, you can email me at googlicious@cnet.com or tweet me @BRIANTONG.
This is what you are watching we'll catch on next time for some more of that Googlicious.
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