Skip to main content

Echo vs Home

We love Alexa! We have had the Amazon Echo for well over a year.  Recently we also got a Google Home, to test it against our Alexa experience.

The quick summary:  Interacting with Alexa is like interacting with a person.  Interacting with Home is like interacting with a computer.  Alexa is fun; Home is useful.  If you took away Alexa, I would be upset - I would be losing a friend.  If you took away Home, I wouldn't care too much.  It was very strange, but I actually felt like I might be offending Alexa when I purchased Home.

Here are the two main differences:
  1. Wake-up words.  "Alexa" is friendly, easy to say, and evokes emotion.  Alex personifies the system - I am talking with someone.  "OK Google" is awkward, and constantly reminds you that you are talking to a machine - I am talking to something.  Of course, Google will update Home to allow us to customize the wake-up word, but the current out of box experience is less than compelling.
  2. Response time.  I have not actually measured these, but Echo feels faster than Home.  It is like the difference between a regular phone call and a satellite call.  On a regular call you connect with the person on the other end.  On a satellite call, with only a slight delay, things get awkward - you interrupt each other, there are strange pauses, etc.
The pictures here are fairly typical - Echo is marketed interacting with people; Home is marketed as a beautiful looking speaker.

Lots of other reviews have covered the capabilities of each.  In the long run, Home has the advantage of being connected to all my other Google services.  It seems technically easy for Google to update Home from being a machine to be a friend.  Hopefully, Google can also make the philosophical leap. Until they do, Home will always "feel" less compelling than Echo.

Popular posts from this blog

The Fourth R.

Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, and algoRithms.  My wife and I were just brainstorming about this: how coding should be the next "basic" skill.  Of course, someone was ahead of us and posted this .  It is awesome to see Mozilla Hackasaurus referenced in this article.  It is a small world. In the early days of the printing press, scholars wrote the books; the press was simply used for production (see this article ).  As time went on, "average" people became familiar with the medium, and used it for their own messages.  We are at just that point with the Web.  Software Engineers write the code, and the Web distributes it.   Software Engineers are the algoRithm scholars of today.  They won't be for long.  Soon algoRithms will be taught starting in elementary school, along with the other three R's.
Read more

Connectome as a Book

Your Connectome is a map of your brain.  Every neuron, every synapse. I am only a few pages into Connectome, but was intrigued by a sentence: "Human DNA....has three billion letters....would be a million pages long if printed as a book."  The companion question, "How many pages for the Connectome?" might be answered later in the book, but I thought I would take a shot at it here. Here is the punchline: Your Connectome book is 6.7 million times longer than your DNA book. That human DNA is about a million pages is not too surprising, although it probably is not optimized. According to quora there are between 1500 and 1800 letters per page.  I am going to use round numbers, namely 2000.  Then, the 3x10^9 DNA letters would actually be 1.5 million pages.  But this is very wasteful.  Even using just ASCII we can encode four DNA letters per character, so the book should really only be about 400K pages.  And, this book is much more interesting; in...
Post a Comment
Read more