Google home AND Alexa?

We’ve had echo since it was in the first pilot phase and use it all the time. But we never ask it to do complex searches because we do those on our phones or tablets so we get the links. We have two different music libraries on it, multiple calendars, and lots of home automation stuff.

We bought the Google home and tried it for five days, then returned it. We had the following issues with it.

One) 360° hearing versus about 140°. The echo has nine microphones placed all the way around the unit. The Google has two on basically the same plane, so it looks like it was designed to be sitting against the wall. Our house is an open plan house and with the echo placed centrally it can hear us in about five different rooms. Google home had a lot more problems in this location, and basically failed to hear us from one side pretty consistently.

This was a big problem in our house, but likely not a problem for a lot of other people.

this is not my house, but it’s a similar floor plan. The kitchen is behind the half wall.

Two) Google home chokes on any **special characters,**even an apostrophe. With three housemates we have a lot of “Michael’s lamp” type names. Echo doesn’t like most special characters, but seems to handle an apostrophe easily.

Three). Grouping. With echo, you can put any device you want to go into any echo group and a device can go into more than one group. So since I say “study,” one of my housemates says “office” and one of my aides says “den,” it’s very easy to allow for all of these.

But probably more importantly is that we can create exactly the groups we want in a very intuitive way. As an example, I have a “turn all lights off” group that does not include One counter light in the kitchen or any of the lights on my housemates’ side of the house. it’s just very natural for me to say after getting into bed “turn off all lights” even though I don’t really mean all the lights in the house. :sunglasses:

Google home doesn’t have groups per se. They have rooms, but a device can only be in one room at a time and then it picks up all the devices in that room. And Google will try to guess what group you mean based on common words in the names for the device.

Lots of reports on the issues for these but we have three different ceiling lights. They all have “ceiling light” in their individual device name, but they are in different echo groups, so that didn’t matter. Google Home, however, decided that Michael’s ceiling light and JD’s ceiling light must belong to a group called “ceiling” and would turn them on and off together. It was possible for me to imagine a naming convention that would keep them separate but not one that I could rely on other people using consistently. This one was really the dealbreaker for us.

  1. We found the music search much better on echo. When you’re asking for things like “what’s the song with the lyrics that go…”. I’ve seen that mentioned by some reviewers and not others, so I’m not sure what makes the experience different for different people.

  2. we can easily play either of our music libraries from any of our echoes. At the present time Google home limits us to one. This was another dealbreaker for my housemate although I’m willing to believe that Google will add this feature later.

Similarly, echo can handle multiple google calendars while Google cannot yet.

  1. Google home’s command phrases for using IFTTT are definitely smoother since they don’t require you to say “trigger.” But it this point, we’re used to “trigger,” so that didn’t bother us.

Seven) we prefer having a name as an awake word. Again there are other households that may not care.

  1. **Multiple devices.**My housemate found that saying “OK Google” to the Google home would trigger his girlfriend’s phone when it was in the same room. The “will only trigger one device” pretty clearly means “only one device on the same account.” The same thing would happen with another Alexa device if it was also always listening, it’s just that there aren’t very many of those devices that someone would be taking to another person’s house.

I’m sure that the Google home’s management of music playback on multiple devices is much better than echo’s since echo doesn’t do that at all, but we actually don’t do that anyway. Small house, three housemates, if you turn the music all the way up in any one room you’ll hear it everywhere anyway. Which can be good or bad. :wink:

  1. Google home is clearly a far superior homework helper for a kid who wanted to ask multiple lookup questions in a row. However, we just don’t use it that way. So while that’s an advantage for Google home, it wasn’t an advantage for our household.

You can see that many of these issues have to do with having multiple people using the device in the same home. And some of them are things that Google is likely to improve on in the future. So I’m sure there are many households where google home would be The better fit.

But for our household, it really didn’t work. Choice is good. :sunglasses:

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Thanks for all the input. Got two more dots instead of GH

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Another GH con: no audio output.

Alexa is more mature when we’re talking about home automation, I like GH for casting video to my TV and of course I think GH is a little bit more conversational. To say that - I like both home assistant.

I am not sure if someone mention this trick but I have Alexa and GH next to each othe and if I want to cast videos to my TV when GH is not around. I use Alexa voice remote to cast the video or audio by using “SIMON SAYS, Okay Google play [video name] on my living room” > and it’s like magic video appear on my living room TV. :grin:

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Had GH for 29 days side by side Echo for testing who gets to stay in my living room…

While Google has a slight advantage of being able to cast things on my TV, its current capabilities are pretty limited and cannot justify the form and capabilities of a Dot. With that said, neither Echo nor GH earned the place in my living room, but Amazon’s Alexa ecosystem wins big…GH is going back and replaced by two Dots, which will finalize my voice controlled whole house project.

Update: one of the decisive factors, was that Google Assistant is not widely available on the phones. I find myself talking to Alexa a lot using my phone than anything else, in the car, outside around the house or just when I am not near any of my Amazon gadgets. Alexa Listens on Android is Amazon’s best third party service!

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Funny you mentined, I used Echosistant to achieve the same thing without saying Simon says and with hands free…

I said Alexa tell Kitchen, OK Google play video on my TV and the Sonos spoke to GH and my boys got to watch the video…

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Is echosistant what you use to make it speak to different rooms? Like if my kid is upstairs I can tell him to come via Alexa instead of yelling through the house ?

Yes, but you cannot push to another Alexa enabled device. You need to have a speaker capabale of playing text to speech messages like Sonos or other connected speakers…

I have an Echo Dot and a Sonos in every room…

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Gotcha. Thank you

The future with those two at once can get complicated…

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Last night, wife tries talking to Alexa, which is about 10 feet in front of us, direct line of sight, very little background noise:
Wife: "Alexa, turn the fireplace off:
Alexa: "I’m sorry, I don’t know how to help you with that.
Wife: "Alexa, turn the fireplace off"
Alexa: "I can’t find a device called Fire Stick in Chris’s account:

Wife (to our GH about 10 feet behind us, without turning to face it, same volume): "Ok Google, turn the fireplace off"
GH: “You got it, turning the fireplace off”

So you’re saying your GH is one-upper? I don’t doubt it a bit and I can’t blame Alexa for not liking it… Lol

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Totes maGoats!

Is there a bitterness/jealousy setting somewhere in Alexa’s options thst I can turn off?

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Just out of curiosity, is the bright portion of the illuminated ring in the position nearest to you when speaking to the Echo from that location? I’ve noticed that depending on placement of objects nearby and the resultant sound reflections (like when the device is on a nightstand near the headboard of a bed) sometimes the ‘dominant’ mic that is selected may be the furthest from your voice. Maybe some random echoes (!) are interfering with its reception.

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I’ve had some rare issues. This past week it’s been picking up the wake word in general conversation or something on TV. Not enough to get aggravated, but it’s expected I guess

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Seems to be about 50/50 whether the green portion is facing me or not. Could be a reflection issue I suppose.

That’s the opposite of my experience. Not with the gadgets, but with the wives :smiley:

Until I got these Echo dots just a couple weeks ago, I was using a tablet with OK google and my own custom phrases. And it had difficulty hearing me clearly, and because I had to repeat it frequently the wife was constantly making fun of it which made it even worse. But she’s now onboard with Alexa! The difference? The launch phrase. “OK google”, for some reason, just does not sit well with many people.

So for now I’m onboard with Alexa. It does everything I need it to do***. Though I would never have gotten onboard had I been required to get the $140 tube… When google changes form factor from a big Glade/Airwick thing to an unobtrusive little thing that I can stick on a wall, I will of course get one. Or two.

***Is your fireplace a zigbee/zwave item? Didn’t know they even made those lol

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It’s a DIY deal using a pocket socket and a SPST relay.

I’ve had a Google Home for about a month now and its great. I use the voice commands to turn my lights on and off with SmartThings. Its great for adding items to your shopping list on the fly, having it read you your schedule for the day, and playing music via the YouTube Red free 6 month trial.

I’ve also found that its a bit “smarter” than Alexa. For example I can ask “OK Google, what was the price of gold in September 1962?” and it will answer me. I can then ask “What about 1963?” and it knows I’ve just asked a follow up question to the initial question and returns an accurate answer. I played around with a buddy’s Echo and couldn’t get Alexa to behave that way. After Christmas I plan to implement my cameras and see what I can do with those.

In your situation I’m not sure theres too much difference between the Dot and GH. I plan to either get a second GH for upstairs or try an Echo.

After an outage and a reset Google home has duplicated everything. I managed to get all my devices working again with Google Home but haven’t been able to get routines working again. Solution was to get a Dot. Works fine. Bottom line- you can use both.