I've resisted getting a smart speaker so far, with privacy, obtrusiveness, cost, Luddite tendencies all factors.
Can see usefulness though, if say, incapacity (of myself) was involved, and I will admit, Matter is intriguing.
Although I've been Android for years, the Apple products interest me, and it seems to have more of a predisposition towards privacy, whether real or imagined.
Which smart speaker system is best?
Are you looking for ones with voice assistants or more of just a speaker that can also do something extra? I'm not an audiophile but do have have Bose speakers scattered throughout the house to stream music from my Synology or a couple of internet streaming music sources. Didn’t care about the voice assistant capability but they run both Alexa and Google if you activate it; also support Airplay/DNLA/UPNP, Chromecast, and Bluetooth connections grouped or ungrouped.
I'm just starting to look around.
Music would be nice, as in Siri: change station to xxx.x
I'm fairly clueless, even as far as identifying what I'd want to do.
Could have an element of a solution in search of a problem though.
They seem to be very popular.
Because of their price and features, I went with Alexa a few years back.
I use to have Google home devices, but they were causing me some grief.
Apple Home Pods seem like a good option as long as their price range works for you.
I've tried google, alexa, and Apple.... I eventually settled on apple. Several benefits over the others. Apple and Google have great TTS... Apple of course has better dashboards for those that use them. Alexa is good for voice command but is a pain to try and setup TTS. Apple , Google, and Alexa do matter. All apple products are TBR's, not all google products are though. You can get refurbed Homepod mini's with a year warranty on the cheap... (had one go bad on me a few years back and warranty was painless) Google's shared room music is no longer as good since the sonos lawsuit. Apple has great room to room music. Alexa's drop in feature is superior to Apple's intercom feature. In the end though, I found Homepod's to come out on top for both Hubitat integration and non integrated options. For pure TTS Sonos/Ikea bookshelf is an option.
Would that be for the Minis as well?
What's the difference anyway? Purely sound fidelity?
I use mainly minis (have 1 full size). Yeah the full size homepod has much better sound (but the minis are no slouches either). We keep the full size one in the kitchen. You can also stereo pair them...
Do you use Google Photos? If so, Home Depot has the Nest Hub Maxes on clearance right now. They have good sound, can do TTS with Hubitat, and make a fantastic picture display with their integration with Google Photos. They are also a Matter Commissioner and a Thread Boarder Router to boot. With the screen you can also get touch based control of Google Home and displays of timers, music, and other voice results.
No, I don't. I wouldn't mind ditching Google altogether, but there's not that much choice.
For family use (mainly music) I settled for echos and amazon music. I loved spotify, but it's impossible to have a spotify family account working independently with a stack of echos.
The voice recog is pretty good too - and using the annoying alexa app with some exposed virtual switches allows pretty much anything through webcore.
This is pretty easily done with apple. It will switch accounts based on who starts casting or who's speaking. We used spotify up until last year on our homepods. So if my wife said, hey siri, play such and such it would play from her account, or mine if I was speaking. Like I said above, the one thing I do love on alexa over apple is the drop in feature.
Home assistant is releasing a voice assistant in a couple weeks
I think the amazon goons deliberately left this annoyance in place to force people onto subbing to their own music service.
Worked for us. Meh.
I have ceiling speakers throughout my home and use HE, Alexa and webcore to control all of my home audio/music/drop-in. I also went with Alexa years ago and have many of them scattered throughout my home. Admittedly, I have not tried any of the other systems mentioned above. But my wife and I are quite happy with the Alexa integration.
we tried amazon music when we had alexa, it didn't work either.
What is "drop-in"?
When Alexa and Google Assistant first came out, I purchased one of each to see which I liked best. For some reason, I liked Alexa best; I cannot tell you why. I now have multiple Alexa devices, primarily Echo Show devices with screens. I even have a couple of Echo Show 15s. There has been some speculation that the 15" devices are discontinued; but others say that they just sell out as fast as they can make them. I do not like the current version of Echo Show 10.
The only thing I do not like about the Echo Show devices is that they are now showing a constant stream of advertisements for stuff related to anything you might have searched for on Amazon. They are trying to use the ads to pay for the cost of maintaining the Alexa infrastructure.
It's fine now.
I don't remember the exact settings (should be an easy search), but you can suppress most of that. If I recall, you set the language to Canadian English and turn off a bunch of preferences. It has worked well for me.
A couple of months ago the Show started sending me "there has been a price change" alerts. I need to check the prefs but haven't yet. People said they add new ad options every now and then that you have to also disable.
Download the Hubitat app
