Apple first introduced Siri in iPhone for people to use as a personal assistant. After that Microsoft released Cortana inspired from famous character in Halo game for Windows PC and Windows Phone. This was the start of voice enabled personal assistant. Today you can able to find Cortana in almost every platform including Windows, Android, iOS, Xbox etc. On that time Amazon took a unique approach. Since they don’t have any desktop or mobile market, they created a speaker with personal assistant enabled in it. The speaker is called Amazon Echo and the personal assistant is called Alexa. After that Google starts to understand that AI and personal assistant is the next big thing in technology after mobile. So, they start investing on that as well. As a result, we got Google Assistant in Android, iOS, Chrome OS and Google Home.

If you follow now a days you can see that the two big companies in AI and personal assistant is Amazon and Google in consumer market. Cortana is targeting business users mainly now a days. Amazon has Alexa in Echo devices and Google has Google Assistant in Android, iOS, Chrome OS and Google Home.

I was considering a smart speaker for my home for sometimes. I was comparing between two products, Amazon Echo and Google Home. Google Home India launch makes me think more about smart speaker. While comparing between Echo and Google Home I found the below points.

Amazon Echo is better than Google Home:

• Amazon Echo has more third-party integration options than Google Home because it’s age is more that the other.
• Echo has more home automation options than Google Home.
• I am now more in the Amazon ecosystem (Amazon prime user) than Google and Echo is a natural choice for me.
• I can attach my Outlook.com calendar with Alexa. But cannot do it with Google Assistant.
• Shopping in Amazon can be done with Echo device.
• I use Outlook.com and Cortana can manage my email and calendar. Soon Alexa will be able to work with Cortana.
• Alexa ecosystem is more open than Google Assistant.

Google Home is better than Amazon Echo:

• Google Assistant can understand natural language better than Alexa.
• Google Assistant can able to answer almost all your questions thanks to Google’s big knowledge database.
• Google Home has multi user support.
• The future updates of Google Assistant is far more sophisticated than Alexa. Google Duplex is one example of that.
• Language translation is more superior quality.

After carefully considering all the points above, I prefer to buy an Amazon Echo Dot. I and my family is happy with it. There are not many options for home automation currently but for news, weather, music and casual questions we use our Amazon Echo Dot. Also, there are many useful Alexa Skills out there. After all, this is the new age and next big thing after mobile.

Arnab