We are in a battle of the AI at the house. We have Siri, Alexa, Google Home and Cortana as options at the home. I have just eliminated Cortana from the mix as too complex to make work with any smarthome. Also Siri with homebridge is the AI for all the phones in the home. So we are now down to two options for the general areas.
I have currently (4) Google Home devices and (6) Alexa devices in the home. I would like people’s opinions on which AI is better for general family use as we want to reduce the amount of AI to either Siri+Alexa or Siri+Google Home.
My current pros/cons of both:
Alexa - pro is all of the skills available
- con is she has a hard time understanding my wife who has a southern accent
GH - pro is it understands everyone
- con is it doesn’t support Apple Music or Sonos
I use GH and Alexa. I don't think either is significantly better than the other.
We are an android house exclusively, so I tend to use GH more. But every time I use Alexa, it works fine too.
A pro for Alexa is that you can manually reassign types on linked home automation devices. I wish GH had that, so you could make fans not be lumped in with lights, for instance (I just move them to a placeholder room for now, which works fine).
A pro for GH is that chaining multiple commands works better, and the 'follow-up' listening feature gets used a lot at my house.
Don’t minimize the importantance of this. Keep your wife happy. You are likely going to tolerate Alexa not understanding you. She will likely not for very long. Make GH work for you would be my advice in your situation.
For the longest time, I had only one amazon account for the family. But I got tired of seeing my wife’s saved music in my amazon music app. So I joined the old amazon account she never really used to our family account; if she logs in to the Alexa app on her phone using her linked account, she should be able to do voice training too I think.
I've been able to set up Alexa integration and control lights with my voice but the Google Home assistant has issues - it works in the app but not voice. keeps saying I need to install voice etc. Haven't really spent the time getting into it.
I did read on the forums somewhere that Google Home mini's make great TTS devices and you can turn off the microphone if you don't want it listening in.
I was looking for something else Alexa related today, but saw this and figured I’d share because this is what we used when we set up the voice profiles. About Alexa Voice Profiles
I have both and prefer Alexa for two reasons; GH doesn't have a brief mode (simple "ding" chime to acknowledge commands") and provides very long voice acknowledgements. And I'm an Amazon Prime member and the ad free Prime music is pretty tough to beat.
I have both and I haven't made up my mind yet but this is the primary irritant to my family mainly because we became used to brief mode on Alexa.
I switched to Amazon Prime Music because of this but found their mobile app, curated playlists and lack of podcast support sorely lacking. Ended up switching back to Google Play Music (without my initial 7.99 plan ).
True. It's pretty basic but works for me since I generally don't use the app. My Onkyo AVR has Bluetooth built-in so connecting the Dot to the receiver is pretty convenient, The extent of my needs are pretty much "Alexa, play [insert genre or band name here]". Best of all no ads and no monthly music fees (excluding the overall Prime membership fees).
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