Google Home
VERY FAMILY-FRIENDLY
GOOGLE HOME HAS plenty to recommend it for those in the market for a smart speaker. Currently consisting of the Home Mini and the Home, this ecosystem of smart speakers takes the Google Assistant voice-powered technology that’s been available on Android smartphones and tablets for several years now and makes it accessible within a speaker that the entire family can use.
The latter point is one of the main distinguishing factors of the Google Home. Unlike the Echo and the HomePod, it can recognise different voices, each of which is linked to its own Google account. This makes the Home far better suited for households than any other smart speaker, as each family member can access their individual calendars, tasks and music libraries.
The other point in the Home’s favour is that it taps into Google’s extensive search engine expertise. Being the market leader for search has given the online juggernaut an extraordinary amount of data to work with, and this breadth of experience really shows in the Home’s ability to answer questions on almost any topic you can throw at it. including Australia-specific subjects. Whether you’re asking about the weather forecast or when your favourite footy team is playing next, the Home is adept at both understanding conversational English and accurately responding with the requested information.
As a music playback device, it supports a decent selection of music services (Spotify, Google Play Music, TuneIn, iHeartRadio and YouTube), however, the audio quality falls short of the mark. The full-sized Home is neither as loud nor as bassy as we would expect for a speaker in this price range, and while podcasts and news reports sound perfectly adequate, we couldn’t help but want more a bit more gusto when it was playing our favourite tunes.
This problem is even more pronounced with the smaller, doughnut-shaped Home Mini. While the larger Home has a 2-inch driver and dual 2-inch passive radiators, the Mini only has a single 40mm driver, making it better-suited for the bedside table than the living room.
Annoyingly, neither of the Home speakers have a line-out port like the Echo range, which means you can’t hook it up to a superior speaker directly. You can take advantage of the multiroom audio feature to have multiple Homes playing the same song, but you can’t configure two speakers for proper stereo sound like you can with a Sonos.
As for the rest of the Google Home’s smarts, it falls somewhere between the Amazon Echo and the Apple HomePod. While it doesn’t support as many smart home devices as the Echo, it works with a good cross-section of the major brands, including Philips Hue, Belkin Wemo, TP-Link, Ring and Roomba. It also has the benefit of native voice-control support for Android TVs and Google Chromecast devices, which can be connected to ‘dumb’ TVs and speakers to add access to popular online music and video streaming services. The Home has also taken a leaf out of the Echo’s playbook with the recent launch of ‘Actions’. Similar to Alexa’s Skills, these extend the Home’s functionality and support a good cross-section of Australia-specific services such as Woolworths, NAB and Optus.
The Google Home performs beautifully as a voice-activated smart assistant — particularly for multi-user households — but it’s let down by lacklustre audio quality.
WHETHER YOU’RE ASKING ABOUT THE WEATHER FORECAST OR WHEN YOUR FAVOURITE FOOTY TEAM IS PLAYING NEXT, THE HOME IS ADEPT AT BOTH UNDERSTANDING CONVERSATIONAL ENGLISH AND ACCURATELY RESPONDING WITH THE REQUESTED INFORMATION.