The Google Home is a smart speaker that doubles as a personal assistant.
A beautifully designed piece of hardware, (you can swap the base to
match your decor), the Google Home gives the black and relatively
bored-looking Amazon Echo a serious run for its money. I have the Echo
in my dorm room, and I just got the Google Home for my HSA office, so I
will do a head to head. Spoiler: the Google Home is a better designed
product.
Let’s start with the aesthetics- the Google Home is simply the sexier product. It’s perfectly curved, has a good weight, and a premium matte finish. The Echo is relatively austere with its monolithic black appearance. What’s more, the Home has a modular base- you can swap it for the color that matches your decor! Side by side, the Google Home looks more friendly, chic, and stylish. Google wins on the aesthetic experience.
Moving on to the AI- Alexa vs. Google Assistant. To be honest, this wasn’t a fair battle to begin with. Google Assistant has a huge advantage because it’s interconnected with your Google ecosystem- Gcal, Gmail, Youtube, Android etc. You can interact with Google Assistant as if it were really your personal assistant. It can give you a briefing of your day, telling you about meetings you scheduled, traffic info about your commute to work, and a summary from your favorite news outlet. You can ask when you should check in to your flight, or to track a shipment, and it will retrieve what it needs from you email. These things are simply not possible with Alexa.The one advantage Alexa has is that it can order things from Amazon for you, but I don’t think most people will want to do a financial transaction without a computer. All in all, because Google is so intertwined in the way we do things, Google Assistant can really be the “person” who knows your life more than anyone else. And that kind of attachment and dependence is a powerful emotional experience.
