9 ms·

Amazon Is Hiring More Developers for Alexa Than Google Is Hiring for Everything

111 points by eplanit 9y ago

jey 9y ago
How do they determine the number of open requisitions? Seems like number of job postings is misleading since one posting could be used to hire multiple people.
- puzzle 9y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking. Google, for one, likes to hire a lot of people under just two-three job descriptions. The author doesn't take any of that into account and it's not clear what the original analysts said, either — perhaps they compensated for this by calibrating numbers against historical employee headcount. Which is still broken, because, historically, Google had varying mixes of engineers vs. non-engineers, for example (but also: employees vs. contractors; lots could be said there).
  - shados 9y ago
    Yeah, wouldn't surprise me. We have 2 public "open positions" for software engineers at my company, when the actual number is more like 80. We just don't post multiple time for the same role/level
- spiznnx 9y ago
  anecdote: I did a google team match two months ago as a new grad and was asked if I would be interested in "Search Infrastructure". I said yes and got set up with 5 calls with different Google Assistant teams.
- kyrra 9y ago
  As an example, lets look at Google Boulder office for software engineer. https://careers.google.com/jobs#t=sq&q=j&li=20&l=false&jlo=en-US&jl=40.0149856%3A-105.27054559999999%3ABoulder%2C+CO%2C+USA%3AUS%3A%3A7.34895525905058%3ALOCALITY&jld=20&jcoid=7c8c6665-81cf-4e11-8fc9-ec1d6a69120c&jcoid=e43afd0d-d215-45db-a154-5386c9036525&jc=SOFTWARE_ENGINEERING&je=FULLTIME& https://careers.google.com/jobs#t=sq&q=j&li=20&l=false&jlo=e... As of right now there are 5 postings. Software Engineer, Engineering manager, student research, and Software engineer new-graph/PhD. That "Software Engineer" title covers many job levels and teams. I can't even imagine how many people are hired under that same title in Mountain View or other locations.
  - kerng 9y ago
    Wouldn't a company have to post every single position because of labor laws, etc. They can't just have one generic position to cover many, or? That would open the doors for bad hiring practices and just picking anyone you want (without proper due diligence) rather then the best candidate possible.
    - antoncohen 9y ago
      No, that is pretty much how they and other large tech companies hire. You apply as a SWE or SRE. Then you basically either pass their hiring bar or not. If you pass, they find out what you are interested in, what you would be a good fit for, and what team is interested in having you. There are exceptions of course, for specialized positions or knowledge. Or if they have big gaps to fill they might do targeted recruiting for them. I don't see why it would run awful of labor laws. They have a very structured hiring process, it doesn't allow much room for "picking anyone you want". If you pass they find a job for you.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > Wouldn't a company have to post every single position because of labor laws, etc No, labor laws in most of the US do not require posting any positions, much less every individual position. (Civil service may require posting civil service positions individually, or at least explicitly identifying the individual positions being hired under a combined posting, and labor agreements may specify requirements for how and where union-represented positions are posted. > They can't just have one generic position to cover many Yes, they can. > That would open the doors for bad hiring practices and just picking anyone you want (without proper due diligence) rather then the best candidate possible. Bad hiring practices are not generally illegal; those that are (racial discrimination, for instance) are prohibited directly rather than by prohibiting things that might open the door for them.
      - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        What about H1B sponsorship? I thought that required some sort of advertising of the position at least.
- CobrastanJorji 9y ago
  Seems like they don't. A quick Google search (ha) seems to indicate that Alphabet's growing by about 10,000 people per year or so. Let's be fairly conservative and say 20% of those folks are programmers. That's still much more than 1,147 people. Besides that, the sentence "Amazon is hiring 1,147 people for its Alexa business unit alone" is very different than the headline, which is "Amazon Is Hiring More Developers." Not everyone working on Alexa is going to be a developer. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but as stated, this whole article fails the sniff test to me.
  - johnkoetsier 9y ago
    Check the link on the second page of the article about what kinds of jobs are open in the Alexa division. Pretty solidly development/technical/product/research jobs
  - ehsankia 9y ago
    20% sounds like a very low estimate for a Software Company. Especially since we are implicitly assuming 100% on Amazon's side. If you want to compare Apples to Apples, take 100% of each side.
- tootie 9y ago
  I don't if Amazon/Google would ever do this or even need to, but my last place used to open reqs and do interviews based on "pipeline" openings which means jobs we might need to staff quickly if new work comes in, but we're not going to call you back if it doesn't.
melling 9y ago
“Amazon is hiring 1,147 people for its Alexa business unit alone,...” I’m sure Google is not going let Amazon run away with the voice assistant market. There’s nothing like an arm’s race between tech titans to move the needle. With the additional efforts of Apple and Microsoft, voice as a user interface will soon be a solved problem.
- samfisher83 9y ago
  70% of people have bought alexa. http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-echo-vs-google-home-sales-estimates-chart-2017-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-echo-vs-google-home-sa... I think amazon has a pretty big lead in the voice assistance market. I know you can use google assistant on your phone, but if you have your phone it might easier to just type it in.
  - melling 9y ago
    Amazon has 70% of the voice assistant market. That’s not percentage of total households. Amazon has taken the Echo global so look for hundreds of millions of users soon. https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/3d8b2e1e-d8c5-41f6-a193-5456a590ef9a/amazon-echo-now-available-to-customers-in-over-60-countries https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/3d8b2e1e-d8c5-...
  - TaylorAlexander 9y ago
    Which people? Surely not all people.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > 70% of people have bought alexa. No, the claim in the source that that article is based on is that 70% of people who interact with a “voice enabled speaker” at least once a month do so with an Alexa.
    - samfisher83 9y ago
      Lets supposed the true sales were 50/50. That would indicate a majority of google people are just buying the equipment and not ever using it.
ams6110 9y ago
They must have high hopes. Alexa is not something I can ever imagine using. I like Amazon's web store, but Alexa doesn't seem to offer anything I would ever want. Do others find it useful?
- jonknee 9y ago
  > Do others find it useful? They have sold tens of millions of Alexa devices, is it really surprising that people find them useful?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - drcross 9y ago
    That's a stretched supposition. How do you know something is actually useful before you purchase it? You're ignoring the sell-ability factor- At 50 dollars it's something people can give to another that offers interactivity and an experience with less guilt if you don't end up using it than a goldfish that gets flushed down the toilet.
    - jonknee 9y ago
      The customer reviews are across the board overwhelmingly positive. 4.3/5 with over 100,000 reviews of the Echo Dot for example. Also the facts that they keep bringing out new devices and are hiring extremely heavily would lead you to believe they see a very bright future in the product.
      - matte_black 9y ago
        When Alexa can control microwaves, ovens, blenders, TVs, phonelines, dishwashers, bathtubs and showers, Roombas, pressure cookers, WOW holy shit, an OS for your entire house. I envision pick and place robot arms that swing around your kitchen grabbing things and preparing meals too.
  - rpowers 9y ago
AcerbicZero 9y ago
I've just hired an extra 8 women, since me and the wife want a baby next month. /s
- melling 9y ago
  Apple has 800 people working on its iPhone camera. https://bgr.com/2015/12/21/iphone-camera-60-minutes/ https://bgr.com/2015/12/21/iphone-camera-60-minutes/ Do you think that natural language processing, knowledge graph, translation, speech recognition, multiple hardware devices, etc will require fewer people?
- gkoberger 9y ago
  The Mythical Man Month doesn't mean "don't ever hire". It just means "hiring is not a short term silver bullet," and I have a feeling Amazon is thinking about the long term. (Bezos talks a lot about how he's currently planning 3 years out.)
paxy 9y ago
Amazon is also laying off a lot more developers than Google is.
- mabbo 9y ago
  Not laying off- just reducing headcount totals. I believe I am in the org being effected. People keep moving to Alexa and not being back-filled.
- CobrastanJorji 9y ago
  They also lose engineers much more quickly. Back when I was there, they leaked SDEs like a sieve.
misnome 9y ago
Great! Maybe in the future it’ll be able to understand, at 10pm, “Alexa wake me up at 7” without asking if I mean “In the morning, or in the evening?”. Considering the time this has been out and the apparent resources, so much of the basic functionality is locked behind formal command patterns rather than anything natural (and every “new features” email I get seems to just be variants of “tell me a joke/fortune cookie/fact”)
- monk_e_boy 9y ago
  Wow, how hard is it to say 7am? This is new tech, I think your expectations are a little too high. Remember windows 3?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - seawlf 9y ago
    The thing is, ALL other voice assistants I have tested get this right. I have submitted three reports to Alexa support about this very thing and they don't care. It's ridiculous that doing something that is so common would be so ingratiating.
  - jschwartzi 9y ago
    If I meant 7pm I'd say 19:00 instead.
- bonesss 9y ago
  Picard had to remind Computer that he likes drinking his tea "hot" 15 times a day -- all signs point to voice assistants forcing us to be hyper literal because they like to mess with us.
- seawlf 9y ago
  Holy shit, that first one is so annoying. I don't understand how even the shoddiest of voice assistants on the market get it right but Alexa doesn't.
derefr 9y ago
This comes down to the fact that each Amazon team manages its own hiring (and so has its own job postings), whereas Google has one top-level posting per role.
- tyingq 9y ago
  Good observation. If true, this story is a complete waste of time. Apples/Oranges.
  - hossbeast 9y ago
    Isn't it a good observation _if_ it's true?
    - tyingq 9y ago
      Urgh. Okay. I thought it was an insightful comment but didn't invest the time to vet it fully. Was trying to highlight the comment because (again, if true) it basically invalidates the whole story. That doesn't happen often. The notable part is that one short comment (could) make the story shit. If google does indeed limit, for example, "SRE II/ Location" to one posting, and Amazon expands that to, say, 100 postings, then the premise is worthless. I don't know how to confirm that.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- travisjungroth 9y ago
  Wanted: Software Engineer. Various levels, focuses and locations needed.
- laluser 9y ago
  This is not exactly how it works. Managers at Amazon can request headcount all they want, but the request bubbles up and needs to be approved. Sometimes, there are top-level hiring freezes as well. The planning and hiring process is more complicated than that though.
shomyo 9y ago
CIA's demand.
non_sequitur 9y ago
Any insight on why Facebook hiring is surging? (13% of workforce). Is it mostly on the AR/VR side?
jorblumesea 9y ago
How many will be there in 2 years or how many have left in the past 12 months? They have insane churn, something like avg tenure is 16 months for an engineer. Between burnout and pip I wonder if this is just hedging bets.
boulos 9y ago
Disclosure: I work at Google. As others said, there's no data on how many people Google or Alphabet are going to hire (postings are not 1:1 with individuals). Alphabet apparently hired 8,057 people in FY 2017 [1]. Note that while HTC had ~2000 people come over [2], that was not closed within FY 17. [1] https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2017Q4_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2017Q4_alphabet_earnings_releas... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/google-htc-employees-acquisition-risky-2017-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/google-htc-employees-acquisit...
throwaway010718 9y ago
Please tell me one of those new hires will help to release an Echo/Alexa Bluetooth Low Energy developer SDK. For years many developers of BLE hardware have been waiting for a BLE capable smarthome hub to win the market. Amazon has won but whenever I ask about the BLE SDK, I am told to "stay tuned". They have used that answer for years now. That means my company will reluctantly release a Wifi Bridge this year. I say reluctant because we aren't motivated to collect $50 per customer on a bridge that will become instant garbage if Amazon does finally release the SDK. We are motivated by how much value we offer our customers, not by how much money we can collect from them. Does anyone know if Amazon is actively working on a BLE SDK for Echo ?
- baldeagle 9y ago
  I really hope that you work for a dallas based smart lighting company.
DannyBee 9y ago
I know Google's overall headcount numbers for the next year, and while I can't disclose them, I'll just say this article is silly uniformed nonsense. In previous years, the reports they have produced have been off by a factor of 10 off what Google later reports in their SEC filings. So I'd take it all with a large grain of salt.
jacksmith21006 9y ago
Makes sense as the Echo has some catching up to do. We started with the Echo but since switched to the Google Home as it is far more capable and also you can use natural language for most things versus the Echo requires much more rigid language.

111 points by eplanit 9y ago

jey 9y ago

How do they determine the number of open requisitions? Seems like number of job postings is misleading since one posting could be used to hire multiple people.

puzzle 9y ago
Exactly what I was thinking. Google, for one, likes to hire a lot of people under just two-three job descriptions. The author doesn't take any of that into account and it's not clear what the original analysts said, either — perhaps they compensated for this by calibrating numbers against historical employee headcount. Which is still broken, because, historically, Google had varying mixes of engineers vs. non-engineers, for example (but also: employees vs. contractors; lots could be said there).
- shados 9y ago
  Yeah, wouldn't surprise me. We have 2 public "open positions" for software engineers at my company, when the actual number is more like 80. We just don't post multiple time for the same role/level
spiznnx 9y ago
anecdote: I did a google team match two months ago as a new grad and was asked if I would be interested in "Search Infrastructure". I said yes and got set up with 5 calls with different Google Assistant teams.
kyrra 9y ago
As an example, lets look at Google Boulder office for software engineer. https://careers.google.com/jobs#t=sq&q=j&li=20&l=false&jlo=en-US&jl=40.0149856%3A-105.27054559999999%3ABoulder%2C+CO%2C+USA%3AUS%3A%3A7.34895525905058%3ALOCALITY&jld=20&jcoid=7c8c6665-81cf-4e11-8fc9-ec1d6a69120c&jcoid=e43afd0d-d215-45db-a154-5386c9036525&jc=SOFTWARE_ENGINEERING&je=FULLTIME& https://careers.google.com/jobs#t=sq&q=j&li=20&l=false&jlo=e... As of right now there are 5 postings. Software Engineer, Engineering manager, student research, and Software engineer new-graph/PhD. That "Software Engineer" title covers many job levels and teams. I can't even imagine how many people are hired under that same title in Mountain View or other locations.
- kerng 9y ago
  Wouldn't a company have to post every single position because of labor laws, etc. They can't just have one generic position to cover many, or? That would open the doors for bad hiring practices and just picking anyone you want (without proper due diligence) rather then the best candidate possible.
  - antoncohen 9y ago
    No, that is pretty much how they and other large tech companies hire. You apply as a SWE or SRE. Then you basically either pass their hiring bar or not. If you pass, they find out what you are interested in, what you would be a good fit for, and what team is interested in having you. There are exceptions of course, for specialized positions or knowledge. Or if they have big gaps to fill they might do targeted recruiting for them. I don't see why it would run awful of labor laws. They have a very structured hiring process, it doesn't allow much room for "picking anyone you want". If you pass they find a job for you.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Wouldn't a company have to post every single position because of labor laws, etc No, labor laws in most of the US do not require posting any positions, much less every individual position. (Civil service may require posting civil service positions individually, or at least explicitly identifying the individual positions being hired under a combined posting, and labor agreements may specify requirements for how and where union-represented positions are posted. > They can't just have one generic position to cover many Yes, they can. > That would open the doors for bad hiring practices and just picking anyone you want (without proper due diligence) rather then the best candidate possible. Bad hiring practices are not generally illegal; those that are (racial discrimination, for instance) are prohibited directly rather than by prohibiting things that might open the door for them.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      What about H1B sponsorship? I thought that required some sort of advertising of the position at least.
CobrastanJorji 9y ago
Seems like they don't. A quick Google search (ha) seems to indicate that Alphabet's growing by about 10,000 people per year or so. Let's be fairly conservative and say 20% of those folks are programmers. That's still much more than 1,147 people. Besides that, the sentence "Amazon is hiring 1,147 people for its Alexa business unit alone" is very different than the headline, which is "Amazon Is Hiring More Developers." Not everyone working on Alexa is going to be a developer. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but as stated, this whole article fails the sniff test to me.
- johnkoetsier 9y ago
  Check the link on the second page of the article about what kinds of jobs are open in the Alexa division. Pretty solidly development/technical/product/research jobs
- ehsankia 9y ago
  20% sounds like a very low estimate for a Software Company. Especially since we are implicitly assuming 100% on Amazon's side. If you want to compare Apples to Apples, take 100% of each side.
tootie 9y ago
I don't if Amazon/Google would ever do this or even need to, but my last place used to open reqs and do interviews based on "pipeline" openings which means jobs we might need to staff quickly if new work comes in, but we're not going to call you back if it doesn't.

melling 9y ago

“Amazon is hiring 1,147 people for its Alexa business unit alone,...” I’m sure Google is not going let Amazon run away with the voice assistant market. There’s nothing like an arm’s race between tech titans to move the needle. With the additional efforts of Apple and Microsoft, voice as a user interface will soon be a solved problem.

samfisher83 9y ago
70% of people have bought alexa. http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-echo-vs-google-home-sales-estimates-chart-2017-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-echo-vs-google-home-sa... I think amazon has a pretty big lead in the voice assistance market. I know you can use google assistant on your phone, but if you have your phone it might easier to just type it in.
- melling 9y ago
  Amazon has 70% of the voice assistant market. That’s not percentage of total households. Amazon has taken the Echo global so look for hundreds of millions of users soon. https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/3d8b2e1e-d8c5-41f6-a193-5456a590ef9a/amazon-echo-now-available-to-customers-in-over-60-countries https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/3d8b2e1e-d8c5-...
- TaylorAlexander 9y ago
  Which people? Surely not all people.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > 70% of people have bought alexa. No, the claim in the source that that article is based on is that 70% of people who interact with a “voice enabled speaker” at least once a month do so with an Alexa.
  - samfisher83 9y ago
    Lets supposed the true sales were 50/50. That would indicate a majority of google people are just buying the equipment and not ever using it.

ams6110 9y ago

They must have high hopes. Alexa is not something I can ever imagine using. I like Amazon's web store, but Alexa doesn't seem to offer anything I would ever want. Do others find it useful?

jonknee 9y ago
> Do others find it useful? They have sold tens of millions of Alexa devices, is it really surprising that people find them useful?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- drcross 9y ago
  That's a stretched supposition. How do you know something is actually useful before you purchase it? You're ignoring the sell-ability factor- At 50 dollars it's something people can give to another that offers interactivity and an experience with less guilt if you don't end up using it than a goldfish that gets flushed down the toilet.
  - jonknee 9y ago
    The customer reviews are across the board overwhelmingly positive. 4.3/5 with over 100,000 reviews of the Echo Dot for example. Also the facts that they keep bringing out new devices and are hiring extremely heavily would lead you to believe they see a very bright future in the product.
    - matte_black 9y ago
      When Alexa can control microwaves, ovens, blenders, TVs, phonelines, dishwashers, bathtubs and showers, Roombas, pressure cookers, WOW holy shit, an OS for your entire house. I envision pick and place robot arms that swing around your kitchen grabbing things and preparing meals too.
- rpowers 9y ago

AcerbicZero 9y ago

I've just hired an extra 8 women, since me and the wife want a baby next month. /s

melling 9y ago
Apple has 800 people working on its iPhone camera. https://bgr.com/2015/12/21/iphone-camera-60-minutes/ https://bgr.com/2015/12/21/iphone-camera-60-minutes/ Do you think that natural language processing, knowledge graph, translation, speech recognition, multiple hardware devices, etc will require fewer people?
gkoberger 9y ago
The Mythical Man Month doesn't mean "don't ever hire". It just means "hiring is not a short term silver bullet," and I have a feeling Amazon is thinking about the long term. (Bezos talks a lot about how he's currently planning 3 years out.)

paxy 9y ago

Amazon is also laying off a lot more developers than Google is.

mabbo 9y ago
Not laying off- just reducing headcount totals. I believe I am in the org being effected. People keep moving to Alexa and not being back-filled.
CobrastanJorji 9y ago
They also lose engineers much more quickly. Back when I was there, they leaked SDEs like a sieve.

misnome 9y ago

Great! Maybe in the future it’ll be able to understand, at 10pm, “Alexa wake me up at 7” without asking if I mean “In the morning, or in the evening?”. Considering the time this has been out and the apparent resources, so much of the basic functionality is locked behind formal command patterns rather than anything natural (and every “new features” email I get seems to just be variants of “tell me a joke/fortune cookie/fact”)

monk_e_boy 9y ago
Wow, how hard is it to say 7am? This is new tech, I think your expectations are a little too high. Remember windows 3?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- seawlf 9y ago
  The thing is, ALL other voice assistants I have tested get this right. I have submitted three reports to Alexa support about this very thing and they don't care. It's ridiculous that doing something that is so common would be so ingratiating.
- jschwartzi 9y ago
  If I meant 7pm I'd say 19:00 instead.
bonesss 9y ago
Picard had to remind Computer that he likes drinking his tea "hot" 15 times a day -- all signs point to voice assistants forcing us to be hyper literal because they like to mess with us.
seawlf 9y ago
Holy shit, that first one is so annoying. I don't understand how even the shoddiest of voice assistants on the market get it right but Alexa doesn't.

derefr 9y ago

This comes down to the fact that each Amazon team manages its own hiring (and so has its own job postings), whereas Google has one top-level posting per role.

tyingq 9y ago
Good observation. If true, this story is a complete waste of time. Apples/Oranges.
- hossbeast 9y ago
  Isn't it a good observation _if_ it's true?
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Urgh. Okay. I thought it was an insightful comment but didn't invest the time to vet it fully. Was trying to highlight the comment because (again, if true) it basically invalidates the whole story. That doesn't happen often. The notable part is that one short comment (could) make the story shit. If google does indeed limit, for example, "SRE II/ Location" to one posting, and Amazon expands that to, say, 100 postings, then the premise is worthless. I don't know how to confirm that.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
travisjungroth 9y ago
Wanted: Software Engineer. Various levels, focuses and locations needed.
laluser 9y ago
This is not exactly how it works. Managers at Amazon can request headcount all they want, but the request bubbles up and needs to be approved. Sometimes, there are top-level hiring freezes as well. The planning and hiring process is more complicated than that though.

shomyo 9y ago

CIA's demand.

non_sequitur 9y ago

Any insight on why Facebook hiring is surging? (13% of workforce). Is it mostly on the AR/VR side?

jorblumesea 9y ago

How many will be there in 2 years or how many have left in the past 12 months? They have insane churn, something like avg tenure is 16 months for an engineer. Between burnout and pip I wonder if this is just hedging bets.

boulos 9y ago

Disclosure: I work at Google. As others said, there's no data on how many people Google or Alphabet are going to hire (postings are not 1:1 with individuals). Alphabet apparently hired 8,057 people in FY 2017 [1]. Note that while HTC had ~2000 people come over [2], that was not closed within FY 17. [1] https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2017Q4_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2017Q4_alphabet_earnings_releas... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/google-htc-employees-acquisition-risky-2017-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/google-htc-employees-acquisit...

throwaway010718 9y ago

Please tell me one of those new hires will help to release an Echo/Alexa Bluetooth Low Energy developer SDK. For years many developers of BLE hardware have been waiting for a BLE capable smarthome hub to win the market. Amazon has won but whenever I ask about the BLE SDK, I am told to "stay tuned". They have used that answer for years now. That means my company will reluctantly release a Wifi Bridge this year. I say reluctant because we aren't motivated to collect $50 per customer on a bridge that will become instant garbage if Amazon does finally release the SDK. We are motivated by how much value we offer our customers, not by how much money we can collect from them. Does anyone know if Amazon is actively working on a BLE SDK for Echo ?

baldeagle 9y ago
I really hope that you work for a dallas based smart lighting company.

DannyBee 9y ago

I know Google's overall headcount numbers for the next year, and while I can't disclose them, I'll just say this article is silly uniformed nonsense. In previous years, the reports they have produced have been off by a factor of 10 off what Google later reports in their SEC filings. So I'd take it all with a large grain of salt.

jacksmith21006 9y ago

Makes sense as the Echo has some catching up to do. We started with the Echo but since switched to the Google Home as it is far more capable and also you can use natural language for most things versus the Echo requires much more rigid language.