The author recounts their experience switching from Google Assistant to Amazon Alexa for their smart home needs, highlighting the improved reliability and user experience offered by Alexa.
This time last year, I was about to move into a new house, and I made the decision to say goodbye to Google Assistant and hello to Amazon Alexa for all my smart home duties. Now, almost a year later, I’m absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do, as it showed me how fuss-free smart home s can be — and how Assistant’s unreliability had been holding me back.
What made me want to change? My smart home requirements are relatively simple, and years ago, I chose Google to take care of everything, mostly due to receiving a Google Home speaker as a gift. I expanded this over time to include a Lenovo Smart Display, a Google Nest Hub screen, and eventually a Pixel Tablet. For the most part, Google Assistant simply took care of my Philips Hue lighting, various timers, some music, and general search duties. Related Well, I say “took care of,” but it never performed faultlessly. Perhaps my most frustrating ongoing problem was asking the Google Home speaker in my office to play the Classic FM radio station, which I did every single day. At least once a week it would not hear me correctly and play a classic rock playlist from YouTube. More than once, it simply stopped working completely due to server-side issues. I felt it was such a basic request, it really shouldn’t ever get it wrong, but it was a shockingly regular occurrence. The Google Pixel Tablet should have been a showcase for Assistant’s smart home ability, but it never really did anything better than my years-old Nest Hub, and it certainly never seemed to understand my requests more reliably. When I tried to add devices and do more with Assistant, the Home app on my phone never made things very easy, and I always felt like I was missing out on functionality. As I packed for my house move, I found an old Amazon Echo Show 5 (a first-generation model) I’d never used, and made the immediate decision it would be the center of my new home’s smart hom
SMART HOME GOOGLE ASSISTANT AMAZON ALEXA RELIABILITY USER EXPERIENCE
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