Google Home, Amazon Echo’s first direct competitor, just hit the market last week. The arrival has led to many comparisons and discussions about these two products.
Google Home, Amazon Echo’s first direct competitor, just hit the market last week. The arrival has led to many comparisons and discussions about these two products.
The British market research firm, IHS Markit, has predicted that Google Assistant will surpass Amazon Alexa in smart speaker shipments by the end of 2019. Google Assistant shipments will be two times more than Amazon Alexa, as the company predicts, 5.4 million to 2.4 million units respectively.
With the introduction of Amazon Echo in 2014, Amazon has taken the advantage as the first-mover and leader in the smart home speaker market. In the virtual assistant field, Amazon has also been aggressively catching up with Apple and Google in AI and machine learning, with its Alexa platform.
In this artificial intelligence field, however, the research firm considers Google Assistant, the second market mover, to take over the market in the next three years. “Google has particular advantages in this arena given the rich trove of data across their services that can be used to drive deeper personalization in virtual assistance,” said Paul Erickson, the senior analyst at IHS Markit.
For its first version, Google Home has received both positive and negative feedbacks.
As online media Recode, the user might put higher expectation on Google Assistant since Google is really good at AI field. However, Google Assistant is not yet as smart as 100% correctness. So when it answers the wrong result, it disappoints the user more. Compared to Alexa, Google knows better about the user since it connects the assistant with the user’s email, calendar, search history and Google Maps. But, the ‘OK Google’ start command makes the user somehow feel more disconnect with the voice assistant.
The QUARTZ praised about Google Home’s better speaker sound quality compared to Amazon Echo, it understands the questions from the users well and the user can customize the looking of the device. But, compared to Amazon Echo, Google Home works a bit slower, the responded answers are more wordy and ‘OK Google’ doesn’t let the user feel natural to say it repeatedly.
And from the Wall Street Journal, Google Home can give more answers to random questions and better music control experiences while Amazon Echo provides more personal skills for its third-party openness.
In the near future, Apple might also enter the smart speaker market with its virtual assistant Siri. “The next few years will be telling for Amazon in terms of seeing how much further oxygen will be left for Alexa in the smart speaker market once Google and others join the fray,” said Erickson.