Humans around the world are increasingly delegating their day-to-day tasks onto smart home assistants and devices. According to a report, the smart home market is expected to be worth about $121 billion by 2022. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) became a pioneer in the smart home connected devices market by launching its Echo speaker in 2015. The idea was simple, but ambitious: the Echo would listen to commands from users and comply. So you could book flights, ask for weather updates, news briefings, shop online, listen to reviews and ask questions, all through spoken commands to the Echo.
Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s Google jumped into the competition after it launched Google Home in 2016, a smart home device built around the same idea. To make things more competitive, Amazon launched a smaller, much cheaper version of Amazon Echo, named Echo Dot in September 2016. Amazon Echo Dot is just a smaller version of its predecessor, with a speaker almost half the size of the Amazon Echo. You can also connect external speakers to the Echo Dot using its 3.5mm port. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) retained all the features of Amazon Echo in Echo Dot. Google on the other hand introduced some highly-advanced features in Google Home, and is continuously working to improve its smart home kit to beat its competitors.
Related Read: 7 Best Uses of Amazon Echo
Let’s compare these two devices to find out which one provides more value for the money based on their useful features.
Music Services
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) Echo Dot supports music services including Amazon Music, Primate, Spotify, Pandora, TuneIn, iHeartRadio and Audible. But there is one caveat: you cannot ask Alexa to play YouTube songs on Echo Dot, because there is no support for that in the device. On the other hand, Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s Google Home supports the free music found on YouTube, plus other services including Spotify, Pandora, TuneIn, and Google Music. Having the ability to play YouTube songs is a big edge for Google Home, as most of us prefer the free content that is easily available and accessible on YouTube. The Amazon Prime Music library has about two million songs available, while Google Music contains a massive collection of 35 million songs. But Amazon Music’s Unlimited subscription could give you access to unlimited songs.
Online Shopping
Amazon Echo Dot provides a robust and smooth experience if you have already decided what you want to buy. But unfortunately, Alexa doesn’t give you an overview of products or compare prices if you need to do a market analysis before making a decision. Alphabet’s Google Home on the other hand can give you an overview of any product when asked. Google Home uses famous product review resources using knowledge graph and deep contextual information.
Follow-up Questions, Learning Conversations
Alphabet’s Google Home is much smarter than Amazon Echo Dot when it comes to figuring out the context of conversations and commands, thanks to Google’s incredible performance in search, algorithms and AI. So let’s say you ask Google Home about the capital of Thailand, it will answer you ‘Bangkok’. Now ask what its size is or what it is famous for without using the name ‘Bangkok’, and Google Home will come up with just the right answers. This is because it uses the contextual information and learns your questions. Amazon Echo Dot cannot answer questions if you don’t mention the important keywords in every command. Amazon is trying to make up for this limitation by adding more “skills” to Amazon Echo Dot. Skills in Amazon Echo Dot are like apps and functions which users can add on top of the basic features of the smart home device. The company claimed in September that Amazon Echo and its related devices have over 3,000 skills.
On the next page we’ll compare Amazon Echo Dot and Google Home based on some other important metrics and features.
