Google Home is playing ads for ‘Beauty and The Beast’
Whether you care about the latest Emma Watson film or not, Google Home will tell you all about it. Recently, the smart speaker’s users have noticed that the disembodied Assistant will give you a rundown of the upcoming, live action Beauty and the Beast when you ask for a summary of your day’s events. It seems widespread beyond the folks who pointed it out on Reddit and appears regardless of if you’ve shown interest in the movie. One of our staffers heard it as well and at least one Redditor says it’s also appearing on their phone. On our house Google Pixel, it didn’t however.
“By the way, Disney’s live action Beauty and The Beast opens today,” it says, amid your daily info dump. “In this version of the story, Belle is the inventor instead of Maurice. That rings truer if you ask me. For some more movie fun, ask me something about Belle.” As The Verge points out, this isn’t an actionable item, really. You can’t buy movie tickets or anything because Google Home doesn’t work with services like Fandango at the moment.
It isn’t too unique — Rokus, Xboxes and even some Panasonic TVs have displayed ads for awhile — but given that advertising is one of Google’s biggest moneymakers, this could become more widespread. When asked for clarification, Google offered the following response: “This isn’t an ad; the beauty in the Assistant is that it invites our partners to be our guest and share their tales.” In other words, you too can advertise on Google Assistant if your pockets are deep enough.
New Beauty & the Beast promo is one way Google could monetize Home. cc: @gsterling @dannysullivan pic.twitter.com/9UlukSocrO
— brysonmeunier (@brysonmeunier) March 16, 2017
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