Saturday, January 18, 2020

Amazon Echo vs Google Home: which smart speakers are best?

(Love asking "Ziggy" to do stuff, one less syllable than "Hey Google"). Shop your favorite products and we’ll find the best deal with a single click. Both the Show 8 and the Nest Hub have intuitive smart home control panels that are easy to use, but the Nest Hub's control center is organized slightly better, especially after a recent update to the UI. He's reviewed everything from vacuum cleaners to beer brewing robots in pursuit of the perfect smart home. He wants the smart home to make him feel powerful, and it's getting there. With a new, better-sounding Echo Dot that still costs $50, Alexa's now in a better position to stay competitive with the insurgent Google Assistant.

amazon echo or google home reddit

All of these devices can go on sale around big discount holidays like Black Friday and Prime Day . The Echo Show 10 has a 10.1-inch touch screen with 1,280-by-800-pixel resolution. The Nest Hub Max has a comparable display that's just a fraction of an inch smaller , with the same resolution. The Echo Show 5 and Nest Hub are both much smaller, respectively featuring 5.5-inch, 960-by-480 and 7-inch, 1,024-by-600 screens. The Echo Show 8 sits between the two extremes, with an 8-inch screen that has the same 1,280-by-800 resolution as the Echo Show and Nest Hub Max, for the sharpest picture. Echo Show devices use Alexa, while Google Nest products use Google Assistant.

Which voice control system should you buy for your home: Google Home or Amazon Echo Dot?

Thanks to the combination of the Alexa app and Zigbee, setting up additional smart home devices is a painless process; tap a few buttons, the Echo finds compatible nearby smart home devices and asks if you want to use Alexa to control them. While other smart speakers require you to have a dedicated hub for, say, pairing a set of Philips Hue lights, the Echo lets you do it all from a single device. Both voice assistants can be used to control many smart home devices, including the big names like Philips Hue lights and Nest thermostats. They can even get live video from certain compatible smart security cameras andvideo doorbells.

And, of course, any smart home devices you already use should be factored into your decision. While we haven’t mentioned it much here, Apple’s HomeKit is the other major player in the world of smart home platforms. This is the ideal pick if you want to control your smart home from your iPhone or iPad, and it works with a fair few third-party devices along with the Apple 4K TV and HomePod Mini. If you’re surrounded by Apple tech at home, it’s the obvious choice but it doesn’t integrate with as many smart home devices as Google or Alexa do.

Similar Meaning: “Amazon echo vs google home reddit”

The Echo Show 5 and Nest Hub win out as the most compelling smart displays under $100 , but the Echo Show 8 offers the best combination of size, power, and price. The Echo Show 10, meanwhile, is the most expensive, but also the most interesting thanks to its motorized tracking. With beefed-up sound at the price of a standard Echo model it's well worth looking at the third-gen Echo if you're thinking of buying a new smart speaker. Improved audio comes close to evening up one area where the Echo Show 8 had previously been superior, which pretty much just leaves the Nest Hub's missing webcam as the only downside.

amazon echo or google home reddit

The upside, of course, is that you can video chat with the Echo Show 8, which you can't do on the Nest Hub. Google Assistant and Alexa face off on their respective midsized smart displays. Apple’s smart speaker comes in yellow, orange, blue, white and Space Gray, giving it the most color options out of the bunch — and certainly the boldest. If you want a smart speaker that can truly stand out in your setup, the newer yellow, orange and blue options are especially worth looking at.

Amazon Echo speakers

And do cloud providers correctly show all cases of audio recording to users? They will try to answer these questions in a wider study that this first iteration is part of. Google’s largest and most powerful smart display is the best one we’ve tested for Google Assistant.

amazon echo or google home reddit

As we’ll explain below, that’s one of the major benefits that Google has over its rival. If you try to ask “Alexa, turn on the lights and tell me what the weather forecast is for tomorrow”, you’ll find that it’ll only deal with one of the things you’ve asked. "At night, I just say, 'Hey Google, turn off my bedroom lights,' and the room goes dark," she wrote. Google Assistant doesn't have nearly as many third-party plug-ins, but it's much easier to talk to. It can understand different requests more easily than Alexa, and that's very appealing.

It has a clear screen, a built-in camera and we were impressed that its facial recognition means it can personalise the reminders and messages you see when you look at the screen. Google’s answer to the Echo Dot, this is a small and discreet speaker that’s affordable and capable of handling all your requests. We’d recommend this for a hallway side table or tabletop as it’s not going to deliver booming sound for music but is still ideal for your voice requests. Want an assistant that can handle a proper chat and can understand you like a normal human? The value of Google Assistant is its natural language recognition and that you can issue several commands without having to say the “Hey Google” wake phrase each time. It’s bigger and chunkier, but if you’re after the best-sounding Alexa-enabled speaker for premium music streaming, go for this.

amazon echo or google home reddit

The speakers themselves don't make that choice any easier, because both are quite good; the Echo has been our Editors' Choice winner for a long time, but the Nest Audio is a close runner-up. The Echo's bass is a bit better and Alexa can use multiple wake words, but the Nest Audio sounds quite clear and Google Assistant is easier to talk to thanks to more flexible natural language recognition. In the sub-$50 price range, the Echo Dot has a clear edge over the Nest Mini in audio quality, but even those two smaller speakers work well for what they are and offer the same choice between voice assistants. The 4th-Gen Echo isn’t just a smart speaker — it can also help get smart home gadgets online and keep them connected using its built-in Zigbee hub.

As someone who has used Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Assistant based speakers over the last 5 years... Personally I find Google Home/Assistant has the fewest issues, and Spotify has some sort of issue across every ecosystem. YMMV, but I wouldn't drop a lot of money to find out everyone's Spotify integration has some kind of issue. "play Spotify on 525" (the name I gave to my "whole house" speaker group), usually results in Eine Kleine Nachtmuzik, which is K.525 in the classical music catalog.

Which one you decide to go with may well depend on which you personally prefer and what kind of products you're using than which is technically 'better'. We have 3 google homes in the house and I loved them except for how annoying the wake word is. When I'm trying to get google to do something and she keeps misunderstanding me, answering the wrong thing, or not turning her volume down, having to say OK Google repeatedly is obnoxious. The Echo Dot is a pretty cool gadget and is probably one of the most popular devices in the Echo line.

Amazon, Apple, Google Eavesdropping: Should You Ditch Your Smart Speaker?

The difference is that it’s focused much more on audio quality, making it the best Google option for music. We found it great at reproducing bass and like that it has Bluetooth to play music from your phone. Voice assistants are clever helpers that are a key part of your smart home system, responding to your instructions, serving up information and controlling your home appliances. You can talk to them from your phone or via a dedicated smart speaker, and the big benefit is hands-free control, so you can get your gadgets working without having to physically touch them. This will determine the specific smart devices you’ll get, so it’s worth knowing the pros and cons of each one.

amazon echo or google home reddit

The discontinued Google Home Max was easily the loudest first-party smart speaker out there, but it's no longer available. Now, the Echo Studio is by far the strongest in terms of sound quality, with powerful audio and the ability to fill a room with directional sound thanks to its angled drivers. The Echo Show 10 is unique among these models with its motorized base that can rotate the screen to follow you as you use it. After spending some time testing it, I was surprised at how intuitive and useful the feature is. The other smart displays require you to stand in a specific area if you want to see the screen, while the Echo Show 10 automatically moves to follow you throughout the room.

Then Google Home is probably for you, as the two areas are only going to become ever-more-closely linked. Google's natural language understanding is superior too, even if its voice implementation still needs some refinement. If you're looking for a small Echo speaker, your best best then is the Echo Spot, which despite its size, offers a richer sound. The screen, however, massively increases its expense, so bear that in mind – if you don't want a screen, the Echo Dot with Clock is an attractive option.

With its 5.5-inch display, you can use it to show family photos, view weather forecasts, and watch TV programmes. Both Alexa and Google Assistant let you combine your devices into rooms, so you can say commands like, "turn on the living room lights." They both also support Routines, which let you combine multiple actions into one command. Most recently, Google released the Nest Hub Max, putting Google Assistant in a 10-inch smart display. It's the first product to come out under the converged brand name of Google and smart home security brand Nest. Recently Google launched a follow up to its smallest smart speaker; the Google Nest Mini comes with three speakers (that's one more than the original), and is made from recycled materials.

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