Different people have different preferences and home set ups, so they’ll like different voice devices.
There’s no question google home is much better at casting music in multi room situations and chromecast. It’s also better at asking a series of homework helper kind of questions.
We tried Google home at our house for five days and ended up returning it for two reasons.
First, google home only has microphones on two sides and echo has nine. Our house has an open floor plan, and the echo was way better at hearing us from several different directions. So at our house echo covered a lot more space.
Second, Google keeps trying to guess what group you want your devices in, like the siren example that @joewom mentioned, and we just had all kinds of problems with that. We have ceiling lights in three rooms, called JD’s ceiling light, Michael’s ceiling light, and kitchen ceiling light. Google home kept trying to treat those as a group and when you turned one of them off it would turn all of them off. With echo, we decide what the group should be called, we decide what devices should be in it, and we can put a device in as many different groups as we want. For us, that just turned out to be way more practical.
We also don’t use the homework helper kind of feature, we just do that on our phones if we want that kind of information.
So both devices have pluses and minuses, and I’m sure they’ll each add some of the features that the other currently has over the next year. This will be good for customers of both.
As far as which is more “conversational,” I don’t think either really is. Most of the commercials and blog entries that show you asking multiple questions of Google edit out the fact that you still have to say “OK Google” every single time. So if you say “OK Google, who played Chewbacca?” The next question has to be “OK Google, what other movies was he in?” Which doesn’t feel conversational to me, even though it’s obviously impressive that Google home knows who “he” refers to in the second question. And to me, there’s not that much difference between that and “Alexa, who played Chewbacca?” “Alexa, what movies was Peter Mayhew in?”
But it is true that you can edit some of the acknowledgement responses that Google Home gives, so it can feel more conversational the first time. But once it said the same cute thing every day for four or five days, it doesn’t feel as conversational anymore.
So I think it all comes down to how you use it in your particular household. Choice is good. 