Amazon and Google are going head-to-head to be your personal butler. Amazon introduced the Echo in 2014: a digital assistant that connects to the internet and responds to your voice to do thousands of different tasks. This May, Google unveiled the upcoming Home at their annual I/O conference: a rival to the Echo, built off of existing Google technology, that will theoretically do everything that Amazon can do and more. If you’re looking for a smart assistant to help you run your home, should you buy the Amazon Echo or wait it out for the Google Home to drop? Here’s our breakdown:
Amazon Echo
The Echo has a head start on Google Home. Amazon has imbued it with a personal assistant, named Alexa, who can do all sorts of things – she can set appointments, play music, and entertain your kid with a game of Bingo. Because the Echo’s been on the market for a couple of years, it works with a wide range of devices right now, including some smart devices like the Nest thermostat that are ironically owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet. It also works with a host of apps and companies, like Uber and Dominoes, so you can literally call a cab or order a pizza without having to pick up your phone.
Right now, this breadth of options make the Echo a versatile and mature choice. If you’re an early adopter of technology and don’t want to wait for your smart assistant to play catch-up while partnerships with companies and new features are rolled out, the Echo may be the device for you. Amazon’s personal assistant Alexa is fairly smart, although not much good with followup questions – when the blue ring on top of your Echo lights up and she responds to your voice commands, you feel like you’re talking to an digital secretary straight out of science fiction.
Google Home
Right now, Home is still in development, so it’s playing catch up to the Echo. Can it surpass Amazon’s effort at introducing a virtual assistant? There’s a few indicators that it might be able to. Echo’s voice recognition is designed from scratch. Home will use Google’s in-house voice recognition tech, which already works great with Android and Chromebook. Early indicators point to Home handling conversational commands and followup questions better than Alexa, powered by the reams of search data that Google’s been collection since the search engine was launched.
Google Home will sync with devices connected by Chromecast; it should be easy to link together Google-enabled devices in multiple rooms to listen to music or call out voice commands. For now, Alexa is limited to the room in which the little black cylinder is placed. Moreover, Home will plug into the suite of programs and services that Google already offers, including music, movies, calendars, text messages and more. The Echo has the edge, for now, on partnerships with other companies. The Home, backed by the digital empire that Google has already built, should hit the market with a range of in-house Google tools and give the Echo a real run for its money. And, as time goes on and Home’s portfolio of partner companies and apps gets deeper, it may pass the Echo up entirely.
