Spotify on Monday began offering all premium Family plan subscribers in the U.K. a free Google Home Mini smart speaker.
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From today, both new and existing family plan subscribers can claim their free Google speaker, worth £49, simply by heading to the Spotify website. The offer ends on 14 May 2019.
Spotify's premium family plan costs £14.99 per month and allows up to six people to access the service using a personal account for each family member.
With that in mind, it's worth noting that the free speaker offer can only be claimed by the master account holder. However the device's built-in Google Assistant can recognize up to six different voices in the home, which means each person in the family can stream Spotify tracks from their own accounts.
Update: This offer is no longer available and Google is no longer offering free Google Home Mini speakers to UK family plan subscribers.
Top Rated Comments
And people wonder why Apple isn’t trying to compete directly with Amazon Alexa and Google Home.
Siri’s feature set is far behind both Alexa and Google Assistant. It’s not just about hardware quality and cost. They have to improve Siri before even making a claim that they are directly competing. For now, HomePod is just a really good speaker that happens to have Siri and work seamlessly with Apple devices. The potential for what a “smart” Siri could add to the HomePod is a promise we haven’t seen any indication of coming yet.Putting Apple Music on Amazon Echos (and likely soon Google Home) isn’t conceding the smart speaker space. It’s about reaching the widest possible audience with Apple Music, in fact not conceding the smart speaker space to Spotify. Inevitably those Apple Music customers will want better sound and a native Apple experience and will upgrade to a HomePod.
Wow Spotify learned from the last free google home mini promo making it only redeemable to master account holder. Last time they did it last year I managed to buy 8 codes for like $24 to get 8 google home minis easily and they sell for like $20 each.
Honestly, nothing to be proud of.But good to know
I really don’t know how so many people keep missing this: Apple has already set the groundwork for HomePod to beat Alexa Skills. Siri Shortcuts have been expanding HomePod’s capabilities with already hundreds thousands ('https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/28/siri-new-shortcuts/')* of “skills” in the year since it came out...
People don’t want to have to create shortcuts to make Siri useful. The Google Assistant provides much better responses to just any general question while Siri tends to either not understand, offer any options for whatever reason, or provides a set of links that Google has provided based on the search. Google will read off the top hit and you can skim through responses with voice commands while Siri requires opening an app.My wife jokes all the time “hey Siri play Supernatural on Bedroom TV.” And it doesn’t talk to our Apple TV because Siri can’t do that. So we have to get our the remote. We tell Google to do the same thing and it works with our Chromecast.
That’s just some examples. I don’t share your optimism for Siri or it’s shortcuts (that have bee around a while now). The HomePod is a great speaker with an OK assistant. It’s currently not targeting the Google Home and Alexa market, but it could be in that category if Siri was greatly improved.
In my experience, I’m not numbing into those “1000s” of “skills.” I’m hitting road blocks. Siri does what I need it to do and that’s well enough for now.
Everyone I know and their mom has a Google Home mini that they got at a raffle or with their purchase of potatoes at the local supermarket.
Apple isn’t in the business of competing with Free. HomePod doesn’t have to compromise on sound quality just so it can try to price match the others. Apple can continue to focus on excellence in sound and design.
Putting Apple Music on Amazon Echos (and likely soon Google Home) isn’t conceding the smart speaker space. It’s about reaching the widest possible audience with Apple Music, in fact not conceding the smart speaker space to Spotify. Inevitably those Apple Music customers will want better sound and a native Apple experience and will upgrade to a HomePod.