Should I buy an Echo or wait for Google Home?

Rob Carney replies: Google Home still doesn’t have a UK release date, so you could be in for a long wait. That said, it’s pretty easy to import one from the US using a service such as Big Apple Buddy. The real question here is which is better: Google Home or Amazon Echo? That’s a tough question to answer, but we’d say Echo is a safer bet for UK users at the moment because it has more support for smart home devices. Google Home is pretty limited right now, with only a few devices (including Nest) supported.

The Amazon Echo can control virtually every smart home device, from Hive to Hue to a Neato robot vacuum. It’ll also hook up to Spotify, as well as play anything from Amazon Music. What we really love about the Echo is the scope for us to ask for more random stuff. For example, when we tell it to “Play sad songs” or “Play party music”. On T3 we have both the Echo and a Google Home. The former gets used so much more – possibly as it sits neatly in the kitchen and is a fantastic tool for converting measurements whilst cooking and listening to the radio.

Google Home is more entrenched in search function, as you would expect from a product created by the internet giant. You can ask this device any question and it will give you the top result from Google. The Echo can’t do this.

So whilst both Amazon Echo and Google Home are amazing products, with lots of promise for future innovation, right now we can recommend one of these devices and that’s the Amazon Echo – purely due to its wide-ranging support for smart home and multiple media options. Oh, and the speaker is much better than on the Google Home.