Is Google Home Better Than The Amazon Echo? (Google Home Review)
The new Google Home is Google’s answer to Amazon’s Echo, the voice-activated bluetooth speaker and home automation assistant. Before going into a comparison though, let’s discuss the Google Home itself.
OK, so the Google Home and air freshner-looks aside, it does look like it belongs in your home. It’s a lot smaller than say, the Echo, and just has a look that will probably fit well with most of your other appliances. The bottom grill that covers the speakers is interchangeable as well with a few different color options, all of which aren’t on sale at the moment, but should come soon enough.
Quick. Which one is the Google Home?
Music
That grill, is covering a couple of speakers that sound pretty decent. While not the loudest of bluetooth speakers, they do sound pretty good and crisp. The Echo, however, wins for the better quality and volume even if just by a bit.
And unlike the Echo, you can actually set a default music player when setting it up so that it will automatically use that to play your music instead of trying to use Google Play (or Amazon Music) every time which, statistically speaking, you probably don’t use either. I use Spotify for mine and that means when I say, “OK, Google. Play my Upbeat playlist.” It knows to automatically find that particular playlist in Spotify and can do the same for Google Play, YouTube Music, and Pandroa for now (but expect a ton more to be integrated soon).
On top of this, Google Home can also do multiroom support and Echo can’t. That means if you have multiple Google Home (and an apartment/home that’s not miniscule like mine), you can have it play music on all of them in sync or have it move the music to different rooms.
I just purchased the home. Waiting for delivery but I’m excited about it. Personally I think Wikipedia is a wonderful tool plus I am a subscriber to Google Play Music. I really think this will develop much faster than the Echo. So we will see!!
Agreed, I love being able to ask my Home questions. It even grabs them from other sites, not just Wikipedia too 🙂
Tell your Echo, “Play Christmas Music”. She’ll immediately assume Amazon Music since that is the default music player (same goes with Play any music). In order to get her to play Spotify Music instead you need to specify Spotify. “Alexa, play Christmas Music on Spotify”.
The difference with Home is you can set Spotify as the default music player and then whenever you say “Hey Google, play Christmas Music.” It’ll automatically use Spotify to do so.
That’s what I am referring to.