With Prime Day coming up, I think I'm finally ready to spend the money to get a home assistant. Alexa seems like a solid choice, but I'm concerned about leaving the Google ecosystem. If I get an Alexa, can I still use it to send Gmails, write Keep notes, schedule appointments on my Google Calendar, use Google Search to ask questions, etc? I use Google for literally everything (Android, getting the Pixel 3 this fall) and have been leaning towards the Home for this reason but don't want to sacrifice technology for convenience. What limitations might I run into? Based on my profile, which would be a better fit for me?
Google Home for sure. Don't trust Amazon's hardware. It's just terrible.
OP, I think you already made your decision
Alexa is underwhelming. I bought one before Google Home was announced and I just _assumed_ that it would have (or I could use IFTTT to wire up) easy integrations to calendars of each of us, but it wasn't. My biggest peeve was that Amazon doesn't have the basic concept of family sharing an account - whether it's shopping account, Alexa, Prime Video or anything else. So, for multiple people to share accounts, and to be able to route different commands to different calendar, ToDo lists or such was incredibly hard. The worst must be, you can't have more than two alarms in the next 24 hours or something. And there is no way to set a reminder - you could only set alarms.
False. I have tons of alarms and can set reminders too with Alexa
Neither. I don’t understand why people think these are useful. I use my echo like maybe once every few months.
smart home is still gimmicky imo
Alexa org at Amazon has by far lowest bar and is is filled with incompetent people who would otherwise be fired in other parts of the company. I can’t imagine anything good that can come out of that. Phrase ‘fired to alexa’ is well known around Amazon.
They're not even in the same league. Google is ahead of everyone else when it comes to machine learning, and you can expect the product to get better every day. Amazon OTOH probably hacks a lot of things under the hood to make it work. Also, you get all the Google ecosystem for free and can easily connect with your other android devices.
Google machine learning is good in part because they know so much more about you than their competitors (e.g. Amazon). If you want a smart assistant, you must be ready to "give more power", otherwise it defeats the purpose. A good assistant will be a wheel in the ecosystem you use everyday, but Alexa is it's own disconnected entity.
Having owned both, you'll have a much better experience with a Home. Audio quality is noticeably better, works really well with other Google products, answers general questions better, and Assistant doesn't lack many actually useful skills Alexa has. Plus, just sticking with one Assistant on mobile + at home is a lot simpler, instead of having to set things up multiple times, for example.
Owned both. Google home is way better
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Home all the way. Much superior product. Alexa is a shitty fluke that somehow got lucky in the market. Voice recognition, knowledge, integrations of Google are unmatched. Having thousands of useless "skills" means nothing.
Alexa created the market dumbass
^Just like yahoo mail, yahoo search, aol...