Google’s Echo Competitor Is a Promising First Try

Ultimately, as I discovered with the full-sized Echo, Alexa is perhaps the first IOT user interface that actually just works. And it’s a big one. After reading quite a few positive reviews, I chose to take a chance and now a week after receiving my Echo Dot, I’m ready to share my thoughts. “What I found was that while Echo is now more capable than Home, partly because a larger number of third-party companies have worked with Amazon to add capabilities to its speaker, Google’s product is poised to surpass Echo in the coming years”, he says. It just wasn’t essential. Its voice assistant, appropriately called Google Assistant, responds to the trigger word “OK, Google”.

Both devices have a futuristic look about them.

I’m not a complete Luddite, of course. “Okay Google, how do I make a pumpkin pie?” That old saying is absolutely true sometimes: It’s easier to give advice than it is to take it yourself. You can link and customize compatible Chromecast devices (my Nvidia Shield worked but my Vizio P-Series wasn’t compatible), choose news sources, and link to the three smart home services now compatible with it. This is the tech giant’s retaliation to competitive devices in the market, such as Amazon’s Echo, following the rising trend and usage of smarthome assistants. “What’s the score of the Cubs’ game?” – but it couldn’t tell me what was on my Google calendar (or any other calendar) for the next day.

While the sound from Home was quite good, my wife and I preferred the Echo’s sound slightly, both for music and voices.

By now, most of us are familiar with the Amazon Echo family: the original Echo, the smaller Echo Dot, and the portable Echo Tap.

Voice assistants are slowly taking over how people interact with technology, Amazon.com, Inc. By my wife coldly declaring that “we should just return it” when I asked how it was going.

But it wasn’t exactly the game changer I expected. And sadly, there is.

Google also embedded a touch panel in the top of its Home speaker, which means you can adjust the volume or pause a song by tapping and swiping the Home, in addition to using voice commands. Google’s repertoire of early partners include Uber – allowing you to call up a vehicle via a voice request – as well as music Spotify and Pandora. Now, it is a time for the relationship with Google Home. “It works well with the smart home, but only with four platforms”.

Setup is quick and painless: Plug it in, download an app (Android or iOS), and run through some simple menus to connect it to your Google account and your Wi-Fi.

As Popular Mechanics’s Eric Limer writes, this limitation is a real negative. Home can also estimate driving time to just about any other destination. But picking a virtual assistant for your home is a bit like picking a roommate – personality matters. For her, well, it is still my personal assistant. While the Echo’s plastic housing has a high-quality matte finish, the Dot is constructed from a glossy plastic, which feels cheaper, and a lot less premium.

Computerworld’s JR Raphael offers a similar view.

Like the Echo, Google Home can control some third-party smart home devices, but I couldn’t test this, as I have decided not to help bring down the internet by owning such devices. If you’re thinking of having kids – don’t. But never forget that although you paid for it and it’s in your home and it does things for you, Google Home is really a new endpoint for an ecosystem and cloud that you’re not really in control of. [It says] “Today, Google Home only supports a single account on the device – but you can use multiple accounts with your music services”.

Atlassian President Jay Simons made the case in an interview earlier this month at the company’s customer conference in San Jose, Calif., that many rival services such as Skype and Google Hangouts are “stuck in the past”. This suggests that they will fix this problem. It’s such a natural evolution from the limited, carefully programmed, responses of the Amazon Echo that when it fails, I’m a little more let down than I should be.