I have a HomePod, a google home, several Echos, and a Sonos setup. The HomePod is incredible for voice recognition of basic commands and that makes a lot of se

I have a HomePod, a google home, several Echos, and a Sonos setup. The HomePod is incredible for voice recognition of basic commands and that makes a lot of sense based on the work they describe in this blog post. HomeKit has also really shaped up and at this point I use the HomePod as a home hub. In the small apartment I live in I’m able to shout commands from another room for things like switching the lights. That said, HomePod lacks integration with any services or devices outside of apples echo system (ignoring HomeKit). You pretty much have to use airplay for almost everything unless you want to use that god forsaken Apple Music; which is fine, airplay is the fantastic, and there are even some good open source implementations too but it just means the voice assistant aspect of HomePod is severely diminished. So I end up using the echo for almost everything because I can hook one up to a pair of speakers and boom I’ve turned them into Bluetooth speakers, or I can use the echo to control Spotify on my Sonos multi room audio setup (and no, airplay on the HomePod is still not as good for this use case imho). The google home is a clever search engine in a speaker but for some real world queries it’ll do stupid things like read Wikipedia instead of telling you the thing you want. So at this point I only use the google home mini as a cheap bathroom speaker because it’s a better than the old gen echo dot (until my new echo dot 3 arrives). The google home overall is the least compelling of all of these. Oh yeah, did I mention HomePod makes a fantastic speaker for an Apple TV (or iPhone/MacBook) connected to a tv for watching video? The low audio network latency of airplay makes it a great stand in soundbar replacement.