Deezer‘s new voice-activated team-up with Google to arrive in Australia by end of year

French streaming platform Deezer announced overnight that it has teamed up with Google to allow its listeners to play music by voice commands through its speakers.

The service, called Deezer For Google Home, is already available in France and Germany, and will be available in Australia by the end of the year.

“Technology today has evolved from a one-way communication to a reciprocated relationship,” said Riad Hawa, Deezer’s VP of Hardware Partnerships.

“So it’s no wonder that we want to feel as close to our devices as we do to our personal hobbies and interests, such as music.

“We are excited to partner with Google to give our listeners a voice activated experience where they can play all their favourite songs, including Flow in the first of many steps for greater personalization.”

At the same time, it is taking on its rival, Jay-Z’s TIDAL by moving further into the audiophile market.

Since 2014, it has through Deezer Elite brought high CD quality music streaming to Sonos speakers.

For three years it has only been available on Sonos.

But now, rebranding Elite to Deezer HiFi, it has expanded the service to half a dozen other brands for double the normal monthly subscription.

These include Chromecast Audio or any speaker that has Chromecast built-in. That opens access to devices from brands including Sony, Samsung, Yamaha, Bang & Olufsen, Harman, Onkyo and Pioneer.

Deezer is branding itself as the first high-fidelity streaming service that also offers voice activation.

High quality audio is the next battle ground for streaming companies.

Spotify, Apple Music and SoundCloud do lose audio quality. Spotify is said to be also working on a high quality tier.

Naturally high fidelity is not just for music lovers. It’s also aimed at cashed-up listeners of its podcasts, sporting streams and e-books wanting greater clarity via 44.1 kHz/16-bit

Deezer, which came into operation ten years ago is available in 85 countries.

It has been hush-hush about its subscriber numbers. But this morning’s media release put its “active users” at 12 million.

Which is far behind Spotify with 140 million users and 60 million subscribers, and Apple Music which has 27 million paying customers.