More broadly, I think it’s an interesting point about Google Home vs. Alexa vs. Home Kit… In retrospect, the Echo Dot’s re-entry into the market place was well-timed to precede Google’s announcement with their smart home offerings (I’m thinking of the event where they also debuted the pixel and their VR daydream setup).
On one hand, Google obviously has a much MUCH larger head start on voice recognition technology through Android, plus a MUCH larger database of things to search through. But more importantly, a year or so ago, Google started their push to make apps “searchable.” That is, in-app data is exposed to Android-layer searching. On phones, the idea was that more information would be easily accessible to the system OS and could therefore provide more predictive responses to the user. But looking beyond this, it’s not hard to see how all that in-app data could be tied into a Google Home platform… This would make it easy to link a voice-activated service to all of our Android apps… Assuming, of course, developers have been making the effort to expose their in-app data structures to the Google API for search indexing…
On the other hand, Amazon already has a big head-start with HA apps (skills) in their market place. Most of them (I’d estimate ~98%) are near worthless, but it’s a sand box where developers are learning what works and what doesn’t. Once an ecosystem starts off, there’s a strong potential for dominant growth, at least for a couple years…
So even if Google Home will have access to more data and provide better integration services, it’s going to take a LOT of concerted effort on their part to leverage this into a dominant position over Amazon. … And Google really doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to maintaining focus on specific goals like this…
Bringing this back to the question of Sonos integration… Well, yes. ST-Sonos integration isn’t fantastic, but it doesn’t a good chunk of what I want it to do. If I’ve learned anything from the last 2 years of playing with IoT, a one-platform-to-do-everything approach really just doesn’t work. Instead, multiple services integrated with one another really seems to be the way to go. Yes, this means learning how to use different platforms, and dealing with headaches in trying to figure our the best way to accomplish specific tasks. But from this point of voice, sub-par integration between any two “nodes” (in this case, Sonos and ST) in the web of services (ST, Sonos, Alexa, IFTTT, etc), simply means that the task should be performed another way (e.g., through the forthcoming Sonos-Alexa integration).
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