Jordan O'BrienThe Amazon Echo is a pretty clever device. Through its Alexa voice assistant its able to control the smart home, set timers and play music – although it’s not alone. Earlier this year Google threw its hat into the ring of this ‘smart Bluetooth speaker’ category and, despite Amazon’s two-year-long head-start, Google may have already won.
Google Home will be officially released in the US on November 4 and will bring the power of Google’s search engine into the homes of thousands. Despite its release still being a day away at the time of writing, Google’s Assistant is already available on the company’s Pixel smartphones and through its Allo app. Google Now has also been answering questions from users for a good few years.
Amazon stunned the world by releasing the Echo in the US on November 6, 2014, but the company will have a hard time competing with Google’s voice assistant. That’s down to the search engine giant’s years of development in the voice control arena and the fact that it’s backed up by the world’s number one search engine.
Google knows more about its users than it would like to admit. It knows which websites you frequent, what emails you’re receiving, what’s on your calendar, where you are at any given moment and just about everything else under the sun. It arguably knows more about you than you know about yourself. Amazon doesn’t have that luxury, sure it knows all about your spending habits, provided you use its online retail store, but it definitely can’t compete with either Google or Facebook in the war of user data.
With all that knowledge Google can answer questions that Alexa can only dream of. Want to know the status of a flight without having to specifically inform the voice assistant? Not a problem with Google Assistant, as Google has been picking up that data from Gmail since the launch of Google Now in 2012. Sure Alexa may be able to track flights, but in order to get it to do so you have to ask awkwardly worded questions like ‘Alexa, ask Kayak when the flight from New York to Boston is due to depart’ – it will then roll through a few select flights telling you each one, one-by-one, until it eventually reaches the flight you want to hear about. That functionality isn’t even available in the UK – although thanks to Skyscanner, Brits can at least book their flights using Alexa.
To Amazon’s credit, despite not being able to automatically know things such as what flights you have booked or orders from stores other than Amazon, the company has been keen to embrace third-party development. Its why the voice assistant can communicate with hundreds of different services such as Sky News, Just Eat, National Rail and Philips Hue without Amazon having to dedicate significant resources to developing support. This third-party support presents one of the biggest issues Amazon has however – communicating with those services can be clunky.
As mentioned earlier, asking Alexa to do anything outside of its factory-built options is awkward. Amazon Echo users have often praised the personality behind the activation command for its voice assistant, ‘Alexa’, rather than having to use the corporate-feeling ‘OK Google’. As soon as you want to communicate with a third-party service however, that personality goes completely out the window. There’s nothing personal about saying ‘Alexa, ask Tube Status about the Victoria Line’. If you simply say ‘Alexa, is the Victoria Line running okay?’, then Alexa will throw a fit, informing you politely that she doesn’t understand what you mean. Sure Google’s Assistant won’t even know how to answer that question, throwing up a Google search result for TFL transport updates, but when Google works, it really works.
In fact, this is a common problem with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant – it just has no contextual awareness. Google has for years developed a deep understanding of what users are trying to say, even if they don’t specifically word it exactly how one would expect – Amazon doesn’t have that luxury. That means interacting with the Amazon Echo is simply a matter of rehearsing exact commands that she will understand – stray outside of those commands and again Alexa will politely inform you that she hasn’t got the faintest idea what you’re on about.
There are certain questions that you can ask in a million different ways and without contextual awareness, Alexa doesn’t stand a chance. I could ask Alexa what the tallest tower in the world is, or the tallest building, or how many floors does the tallest structure in the world have, or what is the height of the tallest building in the world – and only some of those queries it will be able to answer. Google on the other hand will be able to delve deep into its search engine and find the answer to each individual question.
The contextual awareness problem doesn’t stop there – and in fact, this is personally my biggest gripe with Alexa. If I want to turn several different scenes off at once, I have to either have a scene set-up that deactivates several at a time or I have to ask Alexa to turn them off one-by-one. When you want three rooms turned off but a fourth to remain on, it’s often easier to set-up a scene that turns off all rooms and then ask Alexa to turn the fourth back on. It beats having to rattle through each command individually on a room-by-room basis, believe me, that gets tedious. Don’t ever change your mind either – if you set the light level to 50% but find it to be too dim, you’ll have to repeat the exact same command with a different percentage for it to react, unlike on Google Assistant, you can’t just say ‘try 40%’ and have it understand that you’re still talking about the lights.
There’s also the issue of the range of questions you can ask. Yesterday I was in a situation where I had to prepare swede for the very first time in my life. Not knowing exactly what I was meant to do with this giant vegetable in front of me, I asked Alexa ‘how do you prepare swede’. Unfortunately, that’s not a question it understood. So I rephrased, knowing that it’s an American product and it may not understand exactly what swede is. So I continued and asked Alexa ‘how do you prepare rutabaga’ – nope, still no luck. I then preceded to ask Google Assistant and lo and behold on the first try using the word swede it informed exactly how I prepare it.
My inexperience with cooking aside, Google’s knowledge graph has completely decimated any chance Amazon has at being the dominant player in the voice assistant space. Alexa couldn’t even tell me who Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is, but Google’s Assistant provided me with photos, a filmography and similar characters – I could even go so far as to ask a follow-up question such as ‘first appearance’ or ‘creator’ and Google will know exactly what I’m talking about.
Amazon’s Alexa does have the advantage of widespread third-party support however, although popular home automation firms such as Crestron, Control4 and Savant have yet to make their skills available to UK users, despite being available in the US. Google doesn’t yet have this due to its late entry into the space, but that’s not to say it can’t. In December Google is set to release the first SDK for Assistant, while devices from the likes of Nest, Philips Hue and Samsung SmartThings are already supported. Google has also partnered with a range of other firms, including Uber, WhatsApp and Spotify.
Like Amazon, Google is also planning to bring its Assistant to third-party devices. As part of the SDK, developers will be able to port the Google Assistant to a range of devices including the Raspberry Pi or even mass-market consumer products. Amazon already does this, although adoption hasn’t been widespread thus far, with just a couple of devices, such as this smart fridge, trickling into the marketplace.
Alexa is already supported on a range of Amazon products however, with the Fire TV, Tap, Echo Dot, Echo and Kindle Fire all supporting the voice assistant. The support is rather disjointed however; you can’t use the Echo to beam content to the Fire TV or ask Alexa on the Tap to send directions to the Kindle Fire – it just doesn’t work that way. It does with Google Assistant however. Chromecast Audio users will be able to create a multi-room music system and beam music to several rooms using their voice, while Assistant can also queue up movies and TV shows on Google Cast-supported TVs. Since Google Assistant also lives on the company’s Pixel smartphones, users can interact with Assistant on the move – something not possible with Alexa.
The Google Home is now available in the UK and it’s available at a lower price point than its nearest competitor. The Amazon Echo costs £149.99, while Google Home is just £129.99. Despite that, Amazon has one little trick up its sleeve – and that’s the Echo Dot. The Echo Dot is just £49.99, and as it stands, Google just can’t compete with a price that low.