Best smart speakers
With models based on Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and others to come, we’ll help you find the right one. MICHAEL BROWN reports
You don’t need to live in a smart home to benefit from smart speakers. Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and other digital assistants can help you in dozens of ways, and you don’t have to lift a finger to summon them – just speak their names. If you’ve already decided you want a smart speaker, turn to page 49 for our top recommendations.
But consider your decision carefully. In a perfect world, these devices would be interoperable, so you could buy one brand because it’s better for music, another brand because it’s the best for smart home control, and a third because it’s superior for retrieving general information from the Internet. That’s not how it works in the real world. Once you commit to one platform, you’ll want to stick with it.
On the upside, choosing one brand of smart speaker over another generally won’t tie you into that brand’s entire ecosystem. Buying an Amazon Echo, for instance, won’t limit you to subscribing to Amazon’s music services – you can also use it with Spotify, Apple Music and TuneIn. And even if you have a smart home system from one company, you can use voice commands to control smart home products that would be otherwise incompatible with that system – provided those devices are compatible with your digital assistant of choice.
That said, if you’re wedded to Google Play Music, streaming music from your account to an Amazon Echo is not perfectly seamless (the same goes for streaming music from Amazon’s services to a Google Home). And there are some major coexistence exceptions: Google is currently blocking its YouTube videos from appearing on the Echo Show and Echo Spot devices, for instance (although you can get there using a web browser on the second-generation Echo Show), and Apple’s HomePod will stream music only from Apple Music. If you plan to mix and match third-party products with your smart speaker, do the research to make sure they’ll work together.
What can smart speakers do?
With the exception of Amazon’s Echo, smart speakers are powered by the same digital assistants used with smartphones. Siri comes from the iPhone, Google Assistant comes from Android phones, and Cortana from Microsoft’s now-dead Windows Phone platform (Cortana has since found a home in Windows 10). Alexa was created exclusively for the Amazon Echo, but can now be found in a host of other devices.
At its most basic, a digital assistant is cloud-based software that understands natural language voice commands, performing tasks and fetching information for you. In the real world, digital assistants aren’t quite as sophisticated as that. While you don’t need to talk like a robot they do get confused easily, and you’ll hear a fair amount of responses such as ‘Sorry, I don’t know that one’ (that’s an Alexa phrase, incidentally) when you trip them up. The cool thing is that the algorithms powering digital assistants can learn over time and become better at predicting what you need.
Here are just a few of the things that most smart speakers can do:
• Entertain
• Retrieve news and information
• Manage your schedule
• Help in the kitchen
• Contact friends and family
• Control your smart home*
* There are caveats when it comes to using a smart speaker for home control. Smart home devices that
can be controlled via Wi-Fi don’t require any other hardware. Products that use the Zigbee or Z-Wave protocols depend on the presence of a smart-home hub, such as a Samsung SmartThings or Wink Hub. Amazon’s Echo Plus and its second-generation Echo Show are exceptions to that rule, because they have an integrated smart home controller (although it’s limited to Zigbee)
Best all-round smart speaker Amazon Echo Show 5
Price: £59 from fave.co/2VFUy92
Whether you’re using it as an alarm clock, a video player, or a smart home hub, the Echo Show 5 is a fantastic addition to the Alexa family.
The best smart speakers have displays to convey visual information: Everything from song lyrics, to
weather forecasts, shopping lists, videos, security camera feeds, and more. Amazon’s latest smart speaker, the Echo Show 5, strikes the perfect balance between screen size and price, with a 5.5in display and a price tag of just £79. If that’s still too high for your budget, then the Echo Dot (3rd Gen) costs just £59, but it frequently goes on sale for much less.
Best entry-level smart speaker Amazon Echo Dot (3rd Gen)
Price: £49 from fave.co/2D0asok
You can’t go wrong with the third-generation Echo Dot. Amazon significantly improved this speaker’s audio performance, so it’s now the best-sounding smart speaker for the money. You can pair two of them for stereo, and you can add an Echo Sub to enhance low-end frequency response.
Best smart speaker for music Google Home Max
Price: £299 from fave.co/3dPVQEU
It’s no contest on this score, Google Home Max is the best-sounding smart speaker we’ve heard, although Apple’s HomePod comes close. Four Class D amplifiers drive two 4.5in aluminium cone, high-excursion woofers with dual voice coils. Two more amps are dedicated to a pair of 0.7in polyester dome tweeters. The amps have integrated DACs capable of supporting up to 24-bit/192kHz bit streams, although Google says it’s only tested sampling rates up to 48kHz. This speaker will fill even larger rooms with sound, but if you find that one just isn’t enough, you can pair two for stereo.
Best smart speaker with a large display Google Next Hub Max
Price: £189 from fave.co/2rc9WOi
With its messy brand realignment out of the way, Google is making tremendous strides in its battle with arch-rival Amazon on the smart display front. The Google Nest Hub Max delivers great sound, fabulous picture quality, and tight integration with the Google ecosystem. Alexa is still the superior digital assistant when it comes to smart home compatibility, but that advantage won’t last forever.