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I've used both pretty heavily. We just gave away all our google home's except one and all our mini's. Natural language voice recognition is better on google ho

I've used both pretty heavily. We just gave away all our google home's except one and all our mini's. Natural language voice recognition is better on google home. No question there - it's flat out better. I found google smarter. But some deal breaker negatives. I basically want a totally predictable / reliable system. I don't need smarts, I need something useful (honestly, most commands to these things are probably weather, alarm/calendar, music etc). The google app in a multi-person household does not work - sharing / inviting others to manage the house is totally broken. There is some kind of eventually consistency issue somewhere and the internal state gets terribly messed up. Maybe your partner is not into the automation as much as you are are, BUT if you give them the app with total control so they can see / do more, they will be more into it. Some core features for most folks are things like what is on my calendar, set a timer etc. I'm a heavy google user, and I cannot get it to handle my google apps calendar. It's a known limitation. I can get alexa to handle my google calendar! Read here for more: https://support.google.com/assistant/thread/222810?hl=en https://support.google.com/assistant/thread/222810?hl=en Let that sink in. ALEXA CAN handle my google calendar. Google CANNOT! Talk about a surprise when you are setting things up, I was convinced I had done something wrong. This runs through things. The alexa tech is more limited, but they are more customer oriented, listen more. With google, even if it's the #1 request for literally years, and seems obvious (ie, google home should be able to read the events from the google calendar which is under the exact login used for the app) it is flat out ignored. They are simply not customer facing. Another example I don't care about. Folks kept asking for apple music support on alexa. Amazon ultimately did what apple wanted to get music on alexa, even if it impacted amazon.com etc (ie, seem to have cracked down on fake apple products etc). Even though this was an apple limitation, amazon basically spent time to solve this for users. Alexa routines are a lot of fun, worth checking out if you haven't. And a tip -> give amazon some feedback, I've seen them listen.

m0zg 8y ago
You should have said "G Suite calendar". Technically I suppose it's "Google" calendar, so you're not wrong, but a number of things aren't really available on G Suite, which Google positions as their "business" offering. And a lot of other things aren't available on consumer GMail. That's probably why you're having issues adding others to a family group. Should it be available? I suppose it should. But it's not really a problem for 99.99% of their users. The rest can use Alexa. :-)
- privateSFacct 8y ago
  I switched our company to google - I’m someone heavily in the google ecosystem and not supported by google. Alexa does support me even though I don’t pay them for email. This is just one point, but illustrates the point. Google has better tech, but weird product delivery approach. And I moved to AWS from google compute for a similar set of reasons.
  - m0zg 8y ago
    Google works very simply on the inside: you get rewarded for launching _new_ impressive stuff. You rarely if ever get rewarded for fixing old and busted _existing_ stuff. Whether the newly launched stuff is suitable for the user is a tertiary concern. So yeah, no disagreement there, Google is not very user-focused, and has never been. But they're so far ahead technologically that in a lot of cases I'm willing to forgive them their ADHD.
    - privateSFacct 8y ago
      That would totally explain this! I'm often like, this tech is amazing. But wait, this doesn't even work with this other thing it should work with. It's definitely the fix / polish / integrate corner cases. Google+ was a nightmare as well with youtube and other services - again, I was like how are you listening to users with these approaches.

m0zg 8y ago

You should have said "G Suite calendar". Technically I suppose it's "Google" calendar, so you're not wrong, but a number of things aren't really available on G Suite, which Google positions as their "business" offering. And a lot of other things aren't available on consumer GMail. That's probably why you're having issues adding others to a family group. Should it be available? I suppose it should. But it's not really a problem for 99.99% of their users. The rest can use Alexa. :-)

privateSFacct 8y ago
I switched our company to google - I’m someone heavily in the google ecosystem and not supported by google. Alexa does support me even though I don’t pay them for email. This is just one point, but illustrates the point. Google has better tech, but weird product delivery approach. And I moved to AWS from google compute for a similar set of reasons.
- m0zg 8y ago
  Google works very simply on the inside: you get rewarded for launching _new_ impressive stuff. You rarely if ever get rewarded for fixing old and busted _existing_ stuff. Whether the newly launched stuff is suitable for the user is a tertiary concern. So yeah, no disagreement there, Google is not very user-focused, and has never been. But they're so far ahead technologically that in a lot of cases I'm willing to forgive them their ADHD.
  - privateSFacct 8y ago
    That would totally explain this! I'm often like, this tech is amazing. But wait, this doesn't even work with this other thing it should work with. It's definitely the fix / polish / integrate corner cases. Google+ was a nightmare as well with youtube and other services - again, I was like how are you listening to users with these approaches.