Nvidia Spot extends Google Assistant voice controls through your whole home

Nvidia unveiled a little gadget that you stick on a wall in your home, instrumenting it for the voice commands of Google Assistant. The Spot allows you to issue voice commands in your smart home that can control all sorts of things in your home.

The Spot has a microphone, positional information, and networking that enable it to pick up your voice anywhere in your home. So now you can speak commands to Google Assistant, the artificial intelligence voice recognition platform, anywhere in your home.

Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, made the announcement at his keynote speech at CES 2017, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas this week. He said the Spot will debut in the coming months at a price to be determined. The Spot is one more thing that extends the usefulness of Nvidia’s Shield TV set-top box, which now has Google Assistant integration.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.