Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigethan | Hacker News Reader

The speed of iteration on the Alexa product line is really impressive. Nine months ago, Alexa and Google Home seemed like two sides of the same coin. But now it feels like there's almost no comparison, Alexa is gonna do more and get the skills and features that fit my needs faster.

I'm a Google Home owner, so perhaps it's a case where the grass is always greener :-)

View on HN

I'm an Alexa owner, and wish to god the two companies could get along at all. It feels like I'm punished regardless of the ecosystem I choose - if I use the Google Home, I miss out on the Alexa product line upgrades and there's no option comparable to the Dot for sprinkling around my home.

On the other hand, on Alexa I can't say "play fleetwood mac in the living room" (via chromecast). That single feature is nearly enough to send me to Google Home, except for the reasons I mentioned above...but I feel hesitant to stick with Alexa when I know the only reasons it can't do what I want are stupid.

Yup. I'm really fed up with the lack of interoperability. I have an Echo Dot, and hate that I can't use it to play back from Google Music (not without a beta-quality third-party Alexa skill that still requires me to use a stupid trigger word), and I can't push to Chromecast.

But the Google Home ecosystem isn't so great yet, so I don't want to jump into that basket.

I've been messing with some of the open source alternatives (+Raspberry Pi), and they're all pretty rough. I plan to spend some time to put together something easier to use, but it's a tall order.

You can now, multi room audio sync was added recently. I have two Echo's and I can say "play classical music [everywhere|office|living room]"

But if I want to play a show on my Fire TV Stick, do I still need to use the Alexa microphone in the remote, or can I talk to my Echo?

I believe you can now use your echo to control the fire tv

That is correct. FireTVs ship with an echo dot bundle now for that reason.

I don't really care about multi-room audio, I want to be able to play music through my hi-fi system by requesting it verbally, which works with the Google Home and a Chromecast Audio. There is literally no stereo image in these assistant-speakers, I wouldn't really use one for more than casual music listening (which the alexa is fine for, except for the limited library).

I own both a GH and an a 1st Gen Echo and I find Google Home's language processing much better than Alexa's. I can give the GH a complex command and most of the time it will understand and execute the request. So even in a somewhat noisy room if the TV is on or people are taking, I can usually get it to understand on the first attempt. Therefore its great for home automation. However, with Alexa, I have to be quite a bit more precise with my verbal commands or I have to rephrase and repeat the command. So not the best for home automation at this point.

But Alexa does seems to have a head-start with third-party integration and services. So for now I own one of each. I'm hoping that maybe both of them will reach parity at some point and I can finally settle on one of them.

I've always wished the "voice web" would have taken off -- maybe it is about time for it again.

Alexa, Siri, Google Home, Cortana.. they could all use the same standards to become interoperable.

Google supposedly has a new product launch next week.

https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/19/leak-details-google-home...

I just see it as adding vanity features to a mediocre product. People are espousing real fear of artificial intelligence, but since I can't get my echo to play the right radio station more than half the time, quitting after 5 failed tries ("The Current" sounds nothing like "Berlin", I'm fairly sure you could train a dog to recognize the difference) I'm not too worried about robot overlords any time soon.

Get me voice recognition that actually understands language and can be corrected to learn what I want in even the most basic ways and I might change my mind. Adding cameras and screens only makes a creepy device creepier. I don't trust a company that sells me things designed primarily as vectors to sell me more things.

Serious suggestion, try putting on an accent.

This is not a bad suggestion. My usual route is to over-enunciate which is often effective when a conversational tone fails, but you were right, putting on the stupidest accent I could muster got me the result I wanted. I'm still not afraid of our robot overlords.

I for one welcome our robot overlords.

Please don't assimilate me.

Kidding aside I found Siri likes a southern draw, probably has something to do with elongation of the vowel sounds and enunciation. Basically pretend to be Forrest Gump and you're good to go.

I have an Echo and I feel like the voice features are not as a good as Google's offerings. You can do a few things really well with the Echo but once you go outside of what it can do, it's dumb as rocks. You can't ask it basic questions that Google assistant has no problem with.

The Google Assistant is spotty at best. It does do some things Alexa can't do but the opposite is true as well.

I can ask the Google Assistant to call anyone in my contacts and it happens, if I ask for a map to their house it fails horribly.

You can ask Alexa for a map to their house (as a follow up question after calling them)?

I apologize, my comment was very unclear. I wasn't implying that asking for directions was a follow up question for either Assistant. Or that Alexa could handle either of those commands. I was just providing an example of the Google Assistant's inconsistent behavior.

My statement was to establish context, stating that the Google Assistant has access to my Contacts because it can lookup a contact by name, pull the associated phone number, and execute a phone call. However, it cannot map directions to that Contact's address. I know it can Map directions because I use that heavily, it obviously can access contact information, and it can comprehend that a term is a contact name. So the pieces are all their, they just don't seem to fit together for whatever reason.

I'm going to guess that Alexa cannot map to someone's house either but I don't have an Echo Show so that's not something I can test. I also disabled the calling features because I have an objection to the way Amazon has implemented them.

If Amazon offered Alexa for your phone as a replacement for the Google Assistant, I might consider switching if it could handle Maps and Calls at least on par with the Google Assistant. And assuming it's calling functionality was the crap offered on the Echos. Timers and Reminders are about all I use the Google Assistant for beyond that and Alexa already handles those functions with ease.

I'd think about switching to Cortana, since it can run on iOS and has Alexa integration.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com