Ok Google, Showtime. Google Home: "Oh sweet, I feel like a star. Welcome everyone to six months
later, on this episode Josh will be reviewing me...I hope he still likes me."
Smart home speakers made a huge splash a few years back when Amazon first debuted
its Echo smart home speaker device with the Alexa assistant. Now fast forward to
today and we have three predominant smart assistants that, by the end of this
year, will all be living in at least one smart home speaker device.
These are Amazon's Alexa of course in the various Echo devices as well as
other third-party devices like the Ecobee4 smart home thermostat. Apple's Siri
which will be coming out in a new product called the HomePod, which is a
$350 smart home speaker, and then of course Google's
assistant which is in the Google Home. So what makes the Google home a great
choice for a smart home speaker? Well for me, it boils down to three main points
which are the design, search, and smart home functionality, first let's start
with design. I really like the way the Google home looks it just looks like
something that belongs in your house now someone's compared it to an oversized
air freshener but to me it doesn't look like that, it just looks like something
that should be on a shelf, or should be on a table and this is compared to
Amazon's Echo which oftentimes can look like something that's a little too
futuristic, and depending on where you put it in your house could look a little
out of place. Now I also like to look up the Google Home more than Apple's HomePod
or at least the pictures I've seen at the new HomePod device. Maybe I'll
change my mind when I actually see the HomePod in person, but for now to me I'm
not really digging all mesh design of it and it looks a little too blobish
compared to the Google Home. The way the Google Home lights up to let you know
it's listening and how it changes the LEDs at the top for different actions or
situations, it's really well thought out I especially love how intuitive the
volume controls are on it. Now there is of course a mute
button on the back of the device if you don't want it listen for it's trigger
word but I rarely use that now that. Now that we've gone over the design of the Google
Home, let's now go into search or and now what I say search, I'm really talking
about not just asking Google questions and getting answers, but also Google
being able to perform queries and actually doing functions for you. One of
the best functions of the Google home is music playback. What makes music playback
so great with the Google home is you can tell it to play almost any song or album
if you have Google Play Music Unlimited and if you have Google Chromecast Audio
devices on all of your speakers in your house like I do, you can basically tell
Google home to play a song on all speakers and then walk throughout your
house, do chores or whatever, and any room you go into that has a speaker is going
to be playing that song. Now besides music playback, the Google Home has a lot
of other great features you can play a trivia game with your friends, you can
ask it how to spell a word while writing a video review, and it even knows the
context of your search queries so if you ask the Google Home, hey Google how old
is Kevin Spacey? Google Home: "Kevin Spacey is 57 years old." Hey Google, when was he born?
Google Home:He was born on July 26th 1959." Now you'll notice that the Google home knew I was
still talking about Kevin Spacey because it knew the context of the search query.
Now another really great feature of the Google home that I also like and use a
lot, is what's called the my day feature. The my day feature is when you say to
Google good morning, good afternoon, good evening, it'll basically reply "good
morning Josh" and then it'll give me my local weather, tell me how long it'll
take me to get to work in the mornings and then it'll basically give me a
rundown of today's news. It's something that I found that has made getting
reading and getting dressed in the morning a lot more fun and a lot more
informative. Hey Google, define information.
Google Home:"Informative, providing useful or interesting information." Yep, that's the
word I was looking for. Now the Google home can answer questions such as what
is Mars's atmosphere made of, how tall is Elon Musk, and then of course where in
the world is Carmen Sandiego. Hey Google where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
Google Home: "I heard she sneaks around the world, try somewhere in North Carolina." Google, oh you
tease. Now while the Google home will handle most queries for you, there are
occasional times where it just simply can't handle a query, or there are even
times where it won't do a query that it just did literally two minutes ago. Now
the last area of the Google home that I'll focus on is smart home
functionality. The Google home is a great device to have as your central hub to
allow all of your smart home devices to connect to one platform you can control
with your voice. Having a device like the Google home that is always on, always
listening for its trigger word, is really really helpful when you want to turn off
the lights or turn them on in the morning. Now I've never really been a big
fan of Google before, sure I've used a lot of their services and a lot of their
apps, but I think really said to myself wow I love Google like I typically say
wow I love Apple, or I love Amazon. Having to Google Home changed that for me though.
Having a Google assistant that is always on, and always ready to listen
I found makes interacting with a lot of Google services much more personal.
I found that I prefer asking the Google Home things I typically open up a
computer, get into a browser, and search Google for. Now I think the jury is still
out on which smart home platform is going to win out. You know Apple had Siri
first before anyone and then Amazon came out with Alexa and Echo and it has just been
dominating the smart speakers face ever since. But I think if Google keeps
innovating at the pace they are with a Google Assistant, coming out with new
features every few months, I think the Google Home and the Google Assistant are
perfectly positioned to compete well against
Apple and Amazon. And for the first time in my life I can't say that I'm a
100% team Apple anymore, because I love my Google Home.
For 6 Months Later, I'm Josh Teder.