Report: Google is building an Amazon Echo clone, Nest has a security system

The Amazon Echo. Imagine this with Google inside. (credit: Amazon)

The Information has just posted a massive info dump on Nest, painting a picture of a "stalled" company with sales that haven't lived up to expectations and a seemingly rough internal culture. The report says there has been an "exodus" of employees, with more than half of the 100 employees from the Nest-acquired Dropcam walking away from the company. Dropcam co-founder Greg Duffy was part of that exodus, reportedly calling Nest CEO Tony Fadell a “tyrant bureaucrat” on his way out.

Fadell spoke to The Information as part of the report, saying that “A lot of the [Dropcam] employees were not as good as we hoped.” One of the most interesting things Fadell mentioned is that Alphabet is entering a "fiscal discipline era" and asking its subsidiaries for business plans for the year. This comes on the heels of an earlier report that said Alphabet was looking to dump robotics company Boston Dynamics after it supposedly lacked a real product and didn't want to work with the rest of Alphabet.

Drama aside, the report also contains a list of upcoming Google and Nest products. The most interesting is a "Google Voice Recognition device" that "competes with Amazon Echo." The Echo is basically a Wi-Fi speaker with voice recognition technology—think "Siri in a box." Google has all of the voice tech nailed down from its efforts on Android and Google.com, so it's easy to imagine building the existing Google app capabilities into a standalone device. Nest originally wanted a hand in the project but was denied by Google. As for the timing of such a device, the report says it's "unclear when Google will release the device and there’s still a chance it won't be released at all." Previously, the well-sourced Artem Russakovskii of Android Police briefly mentioned an Amazon Echo competitor in development at Google, codenamed "Chirp."

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