Microsoft aims to turn your PC into a Home Hub

Microsoft is reportedly working on a new feature to compete with the Google Home and Amazon Echo smart speakers. Rather than creating an entirely new hardware product, the software giant will make Windows 10 the centerpiece of it effort to make its platform the central hub for your entire smart home.

This new Windows 10 feature will take advantage of the devices you already have, it's entirely software-based and can do everything the Amazon Echo and Google Home can, as well as much more. Because it uses your PC, Windows Home will be able to display information on a screen but it's also an effort to make shared family PCs more communal. But the goal goes much further, Microsoft wants to make it work with all Internet of Things devices that support OCF and OpenT2T, which covers most of the market.

In what might be the most exciting part of this whole project, Microsoft is working on bringing the connected "smart home" to Windows 10 with Home Hub. The goal is to make Windows 10 the central hub for all your smart home devices, including lights, doors, locks and more. With Cortana integration allowing you to use your voice to toggle and control the smart devices in your home, the picture for Home Hub becomes complete: it brings Windows 10 to the center of your entire home.

Windows Central has a pretty long writeup that condenses everything they've managed to learn about the Windows Home project, you can read it over here. The site says this is a really big project for Microsoft and notes it has been in development since before the release of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update.