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Google Home (Assistant)

To avoid sounding redundant, most home automation and secretarial features
are the same between the Google Home (US$129) and the Amazon Echo family.
Where Home excels, for better or worse, is that Google has already racked up
a hoard of information about you, thanks to your search history, Gmail inbox
and the Maps records from your phone. You can simply enquire when your next
ight is, how long it’ll take you to get to work, or what the next appointment on
your calendar is, all with an “OK Google” command. And this is before you factor
in what Google knows about everything else — the questions you can ask its
Assistant AI are limited only by your imagination, and that’s one of the biggest
advantages of having a Home in, well, your home.
Assistant generally answers more questions than Alexa, and gives longer,
more informative replies. It also remembers the context of your conversation,
so you can ask “When was Priyanka Chopra born?”, followed by “What was her
rst movie?” and get the right answer each time. And with support for multiple Pros:
Google accounts, all members of the family can get personalised answers as the Access to Google’s massive knowledge base
speaker recognises di erent voices. Conversational tone, context awareness
Android and Chromecast integration
The Home isn’t completely there yet. It integrates with Google’s
services, but just some of them. It works well with your smart Cons:
home electronics, but not with as many brands Few third-party services
as Amazon does. That said, Home is well worth Does Google know too much?
your consideration, especially if you’re invested
in Android and Chromecast. Google’s endless
knowledge of everything under the sun makes
Home the ideal personal assistant to have.

Apple HomePod (Siri)

As is evident by now, Echo and Home are really AI helpers rst and foremost —
and they can be very useful in that light. Music playback, however, is generally
considered an afterthought on these devices. While you can obviously play
tunes on both, you won’t be buying either one expecting more than passable
audio quality.

HomePod is positioned as the ip side of that coin. Apple spent most of its time
at the speaker’s introduction talking about its seven tweeters and 4-inch woofer,
treating Siri’s role as noticeably secondary. The assistive features are mostly
there — lights, weather, what have you — but much to everyone’s surprise,
Apple didn’t even hint at support for third-party skills, so don’t expect HomePod
to handle more than a very limited range of tasks. This isn’t bound to be so much
a home assistant as a competitor to Sonos speakers on steroids.
And the price re ects that — US$350 is twice the
Pros: cost of the most expensive Echo, and seven times
Best integration with Apple devices as much as the cheapest one. Then again, an Echo
Emphasis on sound quality
wouldn’t be in your consideration if you gave a
Cons: hoot about audio quality. And if Apple had fronted
Exorbitant price of entry Amazon and Google head-on, Siri would be attracting
Zero third-party skills to start un attering comparisons with the grown-up Alexa
No luck for non-Apple devices and all-knowing Assistant. As it stands, then, the
HomePod is perhaps the cleverest way Apple can join
the war of the home assistants. Let the battle begin.

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