Introducing Google Home | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Google Home

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19 pointsandrew372613 comments

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11723652

I never thought people would pay for privilege of having an always-on, data-gathering microphone in their living room, but here we are.

Does anyone own this / alexa and use it for anything other than a glorified bluetooth speaker? I've had an opportunity to interact with one of these at a friend's in the dogfooding program and it's still so far from Jarvis I can't see the appeal. My phone is a much better controller for speakers and the television. (not to mention the privacy concerns of having an internet enabled mic in your home)

I have three echo's at the office. It's utterly boring and completely un-natural to talk to. Even when you learn the commands it feels so forced, having to draw from memory the almost exact syntax required to trigger each skill. Furthermore the majority of the user-contributed skills are absolute nonsense. Top ones include cat and dog facts. Amazon really should curate them as discovery right now is impossible with all the crap. And as there are so few users, there are hardly any reviews - making it hard to find what's good and what's not.

The echos also can't talk to each other - meaning you can't tell echo1 to play music on echo2.

Oh, and the speaker is pretty poor for the value. If you want to play with Alexa, get a dot and hook it to your own speakers.

And don't buy them if you're not in the UK or US. You physically can't set to an address in either of those countries yet - meaning no local features for you - apart from the time.

I find it really funny that the Echo TV ads show use cases that are completely ridiculous. Kid ruins Thanksgiving dinner with the pull-the-table-cloth gag. [1] A guy in a mascot costume can't pick up his keys. [2]

One that comes close to reality is the kid who brings in a bouquet of poison oak and the mom says, "Alexa, wikipedia poison oak." [3] Then Alexa reads off a dictionary definition of poison oak that really adds no valuable information whatsoever.

I guess maybe the ad agency couldn't come up with actual compelling uses for this thing?

1 https://www.ispot.tv/ad/Au4v/amazon-echo-alexa-moments-kid-m...

2 https://www.ispot.tv/ad/Au3M/amazon-echo-alexa-moments-masco...

3 https://www.ispot.tv/ad/Au3N/amazon-echo-dot-alexa-moments-p...

I have alexa and use it all the time. Play music, weather, alarms, sports scores, control the thermostat, read the news, call ubers, tell a joke.

It's not that smart though compared to google search bar, though. It knows a few knowledge areas like movie actors and so on, but can't really search the internet. So I'm excited to get a Google Home and try it out.

But why not just whip out your phone?

Because I might be making coffee at that moment, or getting dressed, or any number of other things that occupy my attention and/or hands.

My phone could be awoken via voice, but requires a pin to unlock it and also does not have far-field microphone tech.

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that demo video is the worst! It doesn't even show what the darn thing does!

It's rather obvious that it's an essential oil diffuser:

https://twitter.com/mcwm/status/794235923454107648

I actually ordered one of these, as I tried the Alexa and found it to be useless beyond asking the weather (which is overly verbose) and playing music (best done via the app anyway).

There are occasions when I just want to get a quick "Ok,Google" search done, and I'm fairly tied into the rest of the Google ecosystem anyway, so it seemed like it would be worth trying.

I heard they have plans to abandon it next month

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