Google Home
Hey, Google! Are you any good?
Google Home is an AI home assistant. So it’s a listening, talking device that can understand your words and respond to a range of orders, questions and requests.
It’s always ‘hearing’, unless you specifically mute its mic, but it’s not actually ‘listening’ until you say ‘Hey, Google’ or ‘Okay, Google’. It’s broadly similar to Siri on iOS, but built into a speaker with a plethora of mics built in.
Core functions are music playback (with support for Google Music, Spotify and various radio apps); giving headline views of news, sport and weather; acting as a kitchen timer and clock; and overseer of your appointments, once synced with Google Calendar. You can also use it to ask Google questions for online answers, and ask it play Netflix movies via Google Chromecast and control a range of smart home products like Philips Hue bulbs and Nest thermostats.
Setup is easy. Download the Home app, turn on the device, follow the instructions and Google Home will be hooked into your Wi-Fi, Google account and the likes of Netflix and Spotify in no time. Account setup is done via the app rather than with online logins and passwords. The quick setup is probably down to the low feature set – Google Home doesn’t do an awful lot at present. Amazon Echo adds a huge range of ‘Skills’ (apps, essentially), offering voice control for everything from summoning an Uber to ordering a takeaway. At present, Google is holding that part of its AI’s potential in reserve.
It’s an attractive device. It comes with a white slate base, but there are four other colour bases to choose from, with two more ‘coming soon’, at a cost of £18 each. Google Home is arguably a better-looking device than Amazon Echo – think more top-brand air freshener than computer peripheral in style. Although the smaller Amazon Echo Dot is way more discreet than Google Home.
In terms of performance, accuracy is hit and miss. Ask for the weather and it will tell you it’s going to be sunny. But when we asked what the pollen count was going to be, we got ‘I’m sorry, I can’t answer that yet’. Google Home always says ‘I can’t do that yet’ in these circumstances. Whether that turns out to be because it will do in due course, or whether it’s just a highly annoying affectation, we don’t know. Home can also respond to a string of requests ‘contextually’ without the need to use the trigger phrase each time, which will be handy for some.
Chromecast kudos
Home has one clear advantage over Alexa, in that it can use Chromecast to send music to compatible speakers. Just as well, because as a music speaker it is nowhere near as good as the Amazon Echo (and the Echo isn’t really a standout speaker). In addition, Amazon is
better at picking songs based on previous music played, better at choosing the ‘best’ tracks by any given artist, better at lyric searches better at differentiating genres and, in general, just plain better.
But unlike Echo, Google Home lets you ask for films and TV shows from Netflix and play them via a Chromecast dongle in your TV. Voice search is supported via Alexa on its Fire TV streamers, although not via Echo. But by definition your TV has to be turned on, with a compatible streamer plugged into it, and then tuned to the right channel for this to work, so the Google Home advantage is slim. There’s support for iPlayer, BT Sport and others via their respective apps, but in a move that slightly beggars belief, Home does not work with Google TV. At least not yet.
When it comes to smart home control, Google Home performs well, but again not quite as well as Echo. Adding new products for voice control is incredibly easy, but the range is rather small. If it’s control of lighting via Hue and temperature via Nest that you want, Home delivers. There isn’t support for Hive products yet, but there is for Honeywell thermostats. Moreover, you can turn Belkin and TP-Link devices on and off, and also use SmartThings and a few other ranges less well known in the UK.
Search supremo
For any users who aren’t yet knee-deep in Google’s Music/Chromecast ecosystem, we’d still have to recommend Amazon’s home assistants – particularly the dirt-cheap Echo Dot – as long as you have a decent speaker to plug it into.
Granted, because of the way Home can access Google Search, it’s better than Echo at answering questions but, curiously, not by as big a margin as you’d expect. In most other ways, the devices are comparable, but Alexa is slightly better, and Amazon’s device also has a far wider range of third-party apps via its Skills system.
That said, just after we finished testing Google Home, Google announced updates for the device, including proactive assistance (checking your plans for the day to try to provide information before you request it), hands-free calling, Bluetooth to sync to other devices, and visual responses. So Google is already working on improvements.