Google Home Mini has hit store shelves, and the devices will soon be listening to a multitude of users very closely.

First announced earlier this month alongside the Google Home Max, it’s the smaller version of Google’s flagship smart home hub offering. The round device is about the size of a donut, and now that it’s officially available Google is offering more details on its capabilities.

Among the most sophisticated of these features is Google Home Mini’s biometric voice recognition, allowing its Google Assistant AI software to differentiate between different user’s voices through a function called Voice Match. It’s a showcase feature for the sophisticated artificial intelligence underlying Google’s newest hardware products – in many ways their key selling point – and another example of how biometric technology finding more and more applications in mainstream consumer devices. Up to six different users can register their voices with a single Google Home Mini.

Other features of the device include the ability to find a user’s Android phone by making it ring even when it’s on silent; enabling voice control of compatible TVs via Google’s Chromecast smart TV adapter; and a sleep timer that will make the device shut off automatically after a certain amount of time so that users can be lulled to sleep by their favorite podcasts, playlists, and so on.

Google Home Mini is available from retailers like Best Buy, Target, and Walmart, as well as the Google Store.

Source: The Keyword