Everyone's connected nowadays so adding things to connect to your home to make it smarter is slowly becoming the norm, honestly I've seen people more excited about some of this stuff than the next iPhone or Samsung release. But what's the difference between a Google Home and Amazon Echo? You can essentially talk to both, but let's look a little deeper than the different parent companies.
Amazon Echo
Amazon Echo is a wireless voice controlled speaker, the obvious difference being that it's made by Amazon, and who doesn't like Amazon (besides brick and mortar stores of course). Echo has Alexa built in to help it help you. You talk to Alexa and can pretty much ask it to things from as simple as playing music to setting your thermostat. So yes it connects to your home, via devices such as Nest, Hue and Wink. It has ESP....No it can't read your mind, ESP with Echo stands for Echo Spatial Perception. Which means it can distinguish between which Echo device, if you have more than in your home, you're trying to communicate with. There is also an Alexa app which connects to these devices.
There are a couple of variations of Echo, there's the Echo Dot (which is like a compact version of the Echo) and just released is the Echo Look (which is a hands free camera and style assistant. ) I am pretty sure this Echo Look is going to be a huge hit with beauty/style bloggers. You can take full length photos of outfits, and with the built-in LED lighting, you're going to get great photos! The camera is also depth sensing so you can focus in on well..the outfit of course! There's even a style check feature that let's you submit two outfits and get opinions from stylists to figure out which one looks best on you. With these three different versions there's an Echo for everyone. Now the Echo Dot is the cheapest of the three retailing for $49.99, the Amazon Echo retails for $179.99, and the newly released Echo Look $199.99 (its currently only available on an invite only basis), but they are all Alexa enabled so you can speak to and connect all of them to your home or however else you want to use them.
Amazon Echo Look (Photo: Amazon)
Amazon Echo Dot (Photo: Amazon)
Google Home
Google is everywhere so why not your home too right? Google Home is also a voice activated speaker, but unlike Amazon's Echo it's powered by Google Assistant. It also can connect to your music streaming services to play your music and can turn up the AC (I mean summer is coming after all). It connects to Nest and Hue, but it also connects to Chromecast, now this feature is almost a no-brainer considering that they are both Google products.
The one thing that seems to be one of it's standout features (and recently added) is it supports multiple users. So it can tell if the kids are talking or if it's you. It's also added 5 million recipes to it, no they didn't cram a digital cookbook in there, but through connecting to sites like Food Network, All Recipes, and other sites. It an read the recipes to you step by step. I personally think this is good as whenever I'm trying new recipes, I find myself going back over to my phone and needed to wake it up to see what the next step is...touch screens were not made for this and that's not why they made screen protectors either lol. Now in order for this to work you need to have the Google Assistant app and then tell it to send to Google Home. From there you can start and ask it to repeat or proceed in the recipe steps.
Google Home (Photo: Google Store)
The name is fitting because along with all the capabilities it has, Google makes different bases so that it blends in with the home, you can make it match the feng shui in the room. Google Home retails for $129.
Which one do you already own or do you have your eye on?
~ChicDivaGeek