The ultimate smart home speaker guide: Amazon Echo vs Google Home
Amazon was the first one to make the smart home speaker market a mainstream one. The e-commerce giant ignited this trend back in 2013 with the launch of its Alexa-powered Echo intelligent home speakers. The company, however, was soon followed by Google. The search giant decided to launch Home, that was an instant hit among the audience. Smart home speakers are quite in demand after that. In fact, they are the perfect kind of holiday gift idea for technology lovers. Several other technology giants such as Sony, Apple, and Xiaomi came much later into the picture. The ultimate battle continues to grow stronger by the day, especially between Google and Amazon. This brings us to the critical question: Amazon’s Echo vs. Google Home: Which one is a better choice?
Image Credit- PCMag
It is not rocket science as such, to be able to figure out that Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home smart speakers are similar in many ways. The first most important similarity is that they both fall into the same price category. This makes it quite easy to compare the two and find out, which smart home speaker features better specifications.
Let’s talk about differences
The significant difference between the two lies regarding the sound quality. Amazon Echo’s audio quality is better in comparison to Google Home. The real value of any smart home speaker lies in the quality of sound it outputs because after all, it is an audio device. Home does not score quite high in that particular department. It seems like Google did pay much heed to the audio feature of the speaker. They intended to ensure that the Artificial Intelligence technology, i.e., ‘Ok, Google’ feature is on point for its owners. Thanks to the extensive Knowledge Graph that Google owns, the search giant was successful at feeding it’s AI virtual assistant with all the possible capabilities. This enhances the power that Google Home packs. In fact, Google uses this as its primary selling point. The company’s primary objective was to offer a compact yet smart smart-home speaker that provides information exactly when its owners need it.
At the same time, Amazon’s Echo does not score high in that particular department. While Echo’s Alexa digital voice assistant is fast enough to deliver answers to the numerous questions asked by the owner, it is not as fast as Google Assistant. The primary reason behind this is that the latter is powered by Google’s proprietary search engine. Whereas, Amazon Echo is powered by Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Everybody knows that when comparing the two, Google’s search engine is kind of faster. Moreover, the consistent effort that the search giant is putting to expand the number of features it offers through its product is only making it easier for them to become efficient and fast.
Google has another upper hand over Amazon, in the sense that the Home speakers are powered by some other proprietary applications such as the Play Store, Play Music, Calendar and Weather to name a few. Amazon offers the same facilities, but the e-commerce giant themselves don’t own any of the services. This makes it difficult for them to experiment or expand the number of things that their speaker can do. To compensate for this, Amazon has collaborated with some restaurants such as Pizza Hut. Through this integration, Echo owners can order directly from these restaurants by merely telling the Alexa digital voice assistant. The drawback over here is that the feature is not made available for use worldwide. It is limited to specific markets such as the UK.
If you want efficiency, Google Home is the right choice for you.
