Google Home Hub smart image filtering means people won't see THOSE photos from your stream

Google's Amazon Echo Show rival lacks a camera but will not show problematic images such as till receipts, or your butt

Google Home Hub
Duncan Bell
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The latest Made By Google hardware event is on now, with the Pixel 3, Pixel 3 XL flagship smartphones dropping, as well as ChromeOS iPad rival Pixel Slate.

And then there's the Google Home Hub. An obvious rival to Amazon's Echo Show, it costs just £139 ($149 in the US of A), which notably bum rushes the Show, which is £219 when not getting one of its semi-regular discount deals. 

Like Show, this new addition to the Google Home smart speaker range totes a screen to display extra information from the Google Assistant. However unlike the Echo Show, Home Hub has no camera, as people get weirded out by that, and can also filter out pictures of you in the nuddy.

As you'll read further down, Home Hub has a fair few things in common with Echo Show, but one feature that hasn't made the cut on the Google Home Hub is video calling. With no front-facing camera, there's going to be no video hangouts for you here. 

Given the spate of recent privacy invasion furores involving tech giants – you probably didn't even know this due to not using it, but Google had to shut down its social network Google+ due to one such recent incident – it's perhaps no surprise Google has decided not to include a camera. After all, this is a device the brand wants people to put in their bedrooms, kitchens and sex dungeons.

The Home Hub will include tight integration with Google Photos, with owners able to ask for photographs from a particular location, or time. And again, one thing Hub has in its feature set, and which Amazon Echo Show does not, is the ability to filter what appears on your photo feed. 

As such, Home Hub will not show potentially contentious images, such as till receipts snapped for your expenses app, or pictures of your genitals. We are about 90% sure that Google's spokesperson confirmed that during the live event, but we're awaiting further details on the genitalia front and how this feature will work.

Google Home Hub

The latest addition to the Google Home line-up has a 7-inch touchscreen that rests on a beefy speaker

The Google Home Hub sports a 7-inch touchscreen mounted on a large speaker base. Given the size of the speakers, we'd expect the Home Hub to offer decent sound quality – somewhere between the Google Home and the Home Max and again probably comparable to Echo Show.

Google Home Hub will offer far-field voice recognition, like the existing products in the line-up, and Echo Show, and can be controlled via the touchscreen, or with voice commands using the wake phrase "OK, Google" or "Hey, Google".

The dashboard displayed on the touchscreen in the leaked product images hints at some of the capabilities of this new Google Home gadget, notably the ability to display detailed directions via Google Maps. 

Google also looks set to include a detailed weather forecast for the next three days in the bottom left-hand corner of the 7-inch screen, with the predicted highs and lows. Home Hub appears to use the same Material Design card-like interface seen across the suite of Google products.

Google Home Hub promises integration with more than 5,000 smart home products from some 400 brands at launch. For example, integration with Google-owned Nest products will enable Home Hub owners to ask “Hey Google, Show me the front door camera" to display a live feed.

If this sounds at all familiar, it's likely because Amazon already offers very similar features with… its Echo Show hardware, which can play live video feeds from home security systems, display detailed weather forecasts, and calendar appointments.

The specs confirm support for dual-band (2.4GHx/5GHz) Wi-Fi, as well as Bluetooth. 

• Watch the Made By Google event live.

Duncan Bell
Duncan Bell

Duncan is the former lifestyle editor of T3 and has been writing about tech for almost 15 years. He has covered everything from smartphones to headphones, TV to AC and air fryers to the movies of James Bond and obscure anime. His current brief is everything to do with the home and kitchen, which is good because he is an excellent cook, if he says so himself. He also covers cycling and ebikes – like over-using italics, this is another passion of his. In his long and varied lifestyle-tech career he is one of the few people to have been a fitness editor despite being unfit and a cars editor for not one but two websites, despite being unable to drive. He also has about 400 vacuum cleaners, and is possibly the UK's leading expert on cordless vacuum cleaners, despite being decidedly messy. A cricket fan for over 30 years, he also recently become T3's cricket editor, writing about how to stream obscure T20 tournaments, and turning out some typically no-nonsense opinions on the world's top teams and players.

Before T3, Duncan was a music and film reviewer, worked for a magazine about gambling that employed a surprisingly large number of convicted criminals, and then a magazine called Bizarre that was essentially like a cross between Reddit and DeviantArt, before the invention of the internet. There was also a lengthy period where he essentially wrote all of T3 magazine every month for about 3 years. 

A broadcaster, raconteur and public speaker, Duncan used to be on telly loads, but an unfortunate incident put a stop to that, so he now largely contents himself with telling people, "I used to be on the TV, you know."

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