The battle of the home speaker AI assistant is coming to Canada

The fight is on, and the battleground is your living room. Or maybe your kitchen.

Google Home, the smart speaker with Google Assistant built in, becomes officially available and supported in Canada on June 26, for $179.

The speaker works in Canada now, of course, but not completely. Later this month, though, you'll be able to talk to the speaker in English or French, and have it play music, or operate a number of home automation devices that are supported. You can change the temperature, turn lights on and off, play music, have a recipe read to you, and even set alarms and notifications.

This week, Apple gave notice that it was entering the arena with the HomePod. Intended to be Apple's extension into your home, and working with your iPhone and iPad, the device brings Siri's voice-activation features to home automation.

Priced at US$349, the HomePod will be released in the U.S., UK, and Australia in December. Canadian pricing and availabilty were not detailed.

Apple is situating HomePod as more of a speaker system with voice-activiation features than a home AI.

Available in white or "space grey", the device has seven tweeters, a four-inch woofer, and will work with Apple Music, the company's streaming music service. The speaker will reportedly automatically sense where it is in the room and adjust its acoustics accordingly, and if there are two in a room they will automatically balance.

The third combatant in this fracas will be the Amazon Echo. It, too, operates in Canada, but only partially. Alexa, Amazon's digital assistant, is not officially supported north of the 49th. But with Apple and Google getting ready for a fight, I can't imagine Amazon is going to wait too long to join in the fun.