Smart speakers seem to be starting to become an increasingly hot field right now, and the Amazon Echo was the first and most successful product in this space, and it's had a good response and launched Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Dot, and many more different products. Version.
And Google Home is slowly starting to become powerful, especially with the Google Assistant assistant that many Android users feel very familiar with. In the last year, Google has made a ton of improvements to Google Home. At the Google I/O developer conference in 2017. Google announced Google Home support for features like hands-free calling and visualization Chromecast, and this makes Google Home look more promising.
Of course, neither product is perfect, some are good for listening to music, some are not good at smart home control, and some can even be used directly for voice calls with friends and family. So as the two smart speakers on the market that really sell smart, which one is better? Let's take a look.
Google Home
Many media commented on the appearance of Google Home, saying that it looks like an air humidifier, which is indeed an apt description. And this description is not a bad thing. Smart speakers are products that are placed at home to integrate with the home environment and integrate with our lives as seamlessly as possible. The top half of the Google Home is uniformly white, but the bottom half can be customized to suit your needs. Google offers a number of different options for the bottom half of the Google Home, from a gray fabric base to a variety of color and material options, and costs an extra $20 to $40.
The Google Home has only one physical button, and that's the mute button when you don't want to listen to it or want to be quiet. In addition, most functions of the Google Home are controlled by voice commands, and there is a touch-capacitive panel on the top that can be used to adjust the volume, pause, and stop the sound.
The Google Home has red, green, blue, and yellow lights on top, and the four lights also glow and spin as we issue voice commands, and there's a really fun animation. The cables under the Google Home are neat and long and can be placed in different places in the home without looking out of place.
Overall, Google Home is a good choice in appearance, and it can be placed in the home to blend in with the surrounding environment.
Amazon Echo
The Amazon Echo is an elongated cylinder and is available in black or white, though most people will choose black. After all, black can adapt to a variety of styles, and the white Echo is more integrated with modern decoration styles. The Echo's design is simple and understated, so it blends in with the environment on any desktop.
The Echo has a dedicated disc at the top to adjust the volume. You can press the mute button when you don't want to talk or make the Echo work, and you can also choose to manually activate it by pressing another button if you don't want to wake up Alexa's name or activate it with a voice command.
The Echo looks simple, but there's not much to introduce. Echo will naturally integrate into our lives, and from this perspective, such a design is also great.
Music and entertainment
Both Google Home and Echo can be connected to mainstream online streaming music services such as Spotify or Pandora after logging in to the account. Google Home supports Spotify, Pandora, Google Play Music, and YouTube Music, while Echo supports Spotify, Pandora, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, Audible, Amazon Music, Prime Music, Amazon Music, etc. Obviously, the latter is more abundant. However, Google Home also allows you to sync various apps and Chrome tabs through Google's Pocket Cast feature, which is obviously another advantage of Google Home. Obviously, more of Echo's services come from Amazon, and this is where the value of the Amazon ecosystem lies. And Google just offered free Spotify billing, while Amazon only supports premium users.
Both smart speakers have plenty of volumes, but in terms of specific numbers, the Echo is 4.5 decibels louder than the Google Home. The Echo uses a surround-speaker design, while the Google Home uses a front driver with a passive diffuser on the side. Compared to the Echo, a design like the Google Home is better in terms of bass, and the Echo can play a better role in the center of the area, and the Google Home is more suitable for a corner of the home. If you want to fill the room with music, you can connect multiple Google Homes to a single source to gradually increase the audio.
Both smart speakers faced the same problem that sometimes caused voice command keywords to not be received when playing music or other audio files. Both products are triggered by voice commands, so if the sound of the music is too loud, it will affect the use effect. In our tests, the Google Home was louder and worked relatively better.
With Google Home, we can use voice and Chromecast to control the video on the TV, which is very useful for those who are just sitting in front of the TV for a short time, don't have a smartphone in hand, and just want to change channels quickly. Chromecast now supports YouTube, Netflix, HBO Now, Hulu, and more. And Amazon Fire TV, the main competitor to Google's Chromecast, doesn't yet offer integration. If you choose Amazon, there's no way to quickly jump to the favorites menu for the time being.
Of course, if you have Logitech's Harmony universal remote, all problems are solved. It can connect to the Echo remotely, turn on the TV directly, jump to different services, and even allow us to quickly jump to different channels and services by setting keywords. We won't delve into this feature, though, since it's not part of the comparison between Google Home and Echo, after all.
Both the Google Home and the Echo have a lot of interesting uses, like playing some puzzle games with both. But Echo's games are all built on different "skills," which isn't necessarily a bad thing, allowing us to experience more different types of games. And just search through the various methods Amazon offers to choose the game you want. The Google Home's games are fun, but the number is relatively small, compared to the hundreds of Echo's games.
Both products can be used to tell jokes and sing songs, but only for entertainment. Obviously, the engineers at Amazon and Google have spent a lot of time trying to respond to various situations, and if you look closely enough, you'll find a lot of interesting applications. For example, Google Home and Echo will sing you a birthday song, and Google Home's melody is more standard.
Personal assistant
If you want a more hands-on test of both products, both Google Home and Echo have a lot of similar features. They can both tell you where the nearest store is, while Google can directly call its own map service and give you an estimated driving time, while the Echo will only tell you how far away. They all report weather forecasts, but it seems that the sources of the data are different, and sometimes in the test, the weather forecast data for the same location will have some differences.
Both Google Home and Echo will tell you news from different sources, and both offer the default NPR newsletter. You can also ask them about the results of sports games, and you can also pull up more information from Wikipedia. Google Home can understand context, such as asking the age of some actors or athletes, or figuring out when games start and when movies are released. Of course, having to say OK between every question is a bit of a hassle compared to using Alexa. Anyway, repeating a word in a row over a period of time is really annoying, and we hope Google or Amazon will fix this in the future.
The biggest advantage of having such a personal assistant at home is that it can control smart home products represented by smart light bulbs. Both assistants support smart light bulbs like Philips Hue and LIFX and can be controlled with your voice. After setting up the rooms, we can group controls according to their names, so that when we get home, we can control them with commands like kitchen, bedroom, or all lights. Both the Echo and Google Home work perfectly with these smart light bulbs, and they're there when you need them.
Google Home can connect to some of Google's own services, like Google Calendar, to set up events directly under your Google account, then mark a time and place for scheduling. However, this feature only supports Google Calendar, while the Amazon Echo accesses Microsoft's Outlook service. But when it comes to simple tasks like adding reminders and creating to-do events, Google is a little behind.
Both assistants can create timers, which come into play when we're cooking in the kitchen. Both voice assistants can help us know many different menus. In contrast, Google Home is a little more intimate during the cooking process. If you accidentally miss a step, you can simply ask "what was the previous step?" and it will revert to the previous step and do it all over again. In addition, we can view more than 5 million different recipes from our smartphones, and then send them to the smart assistant to tell us.
An interesting addition to Google Home is multi-user support. For example, we can train Google Home based on the voices of different family members, so that when users with different voices ask the same question, the answers are also different. For example, the work path and planning of different members can be automatically identified according to different voices. This multi-user automatic identification function has many potential applications in the future, and we are sure that Google will make it play a greater role in the future.
The Amazon Echo can make free Internet calls through Alexa, but with the update to Google Home, the latter has also added support for this feature. As long as we have a stable internet connection at home, both can make calls very well.
Another natural advantage for the Amazon Echo is the connection to an Amazon account. In this way, we can directly order and shop online through voice commands, so if we want to order a pizza, just say the keyword, and the order can be successful. This is a very convenient feature for avid online shoppers. In addition, Amazon will often launch a variety of different promotions, which is also very convenient for Echo users.
In our test of how fast the two respond to voice commands, the Google Home won 10 out of 15 tests, with an average response time of 1.56 seconds, compared to the Echo's 1.66 seconds. Although the difference doesn't seem obvious, so don't get too hung up on the problem, our ears are basically unable to detect this little difference.
Summarize
If you want to say who is better Echo or Google Home, frankly, it depends on your needs and use. Both smart speakers have their own pros and cons, but the Amazon Echo is still the more popular product and is more compatible with smart homes.
Still, which personal assistant you choose is ultimately up to you. It's clear that over the past year, Google has dramatically improved its own performance, while Amazon is betting on third-party developers to leverage others' power to enable more functionality. With free phone calls, and Chromecast support, and if you're already a user of the Google ecosystem, the Google Home is the obvious choice. The Echo, on the other hand, is more suitable for independent new users.
Also, if you want to go for the Echo, consider the cheaper Echo Dot, which just doesn't sound as good. But you can do the same thing as the Echo by connecting it to a Bluetooth speaker.
Overall, Google has made Google Home even more impressive to us with continued updates. And the Echo is still the most popular option on the market.
