68 ANDROID ADVISOR • ISSUE 44
REVIEW
not as scary as it sounds. Partnerships are already in
place for big names such as Philips Hue, Samsung
Nest and WeMo and more will certainly follow.Why Google Assistant is
better than Amazon Alexa?
If you’re new to smart speakers and the idea of
smart virtual assistants, trying to work out whether
you should go down the Amazon Echo route or
the Google Home route could be tricky. Both offer
reasonably cheap entry points (the Echo Dot costs £49
from fave.co/2yLE2aZ), both are said to offer much the
same functionality, and for now at least the Amazon
Echo has by far the highest market share.
So why is that? For a start Amazon Echo came out
in the UK a good year before Google Home, giving it
the head start it needed to find its way into consumer
homes all over the country. It used some of that time
to build up its ‘Skills’ database, albeit with thousands
of entries you will likely never use, such as apps that
can insult you or tell you what noise a dog makes
when given a very specific command. But it does –
for now – have better native support for smart-home
services than does Google Assistant.
It has also benefited from various Amazon deals
days that see the Echo vastly reduced in price, making
it worth a punt even if you’re not sure about the whole
concept of smart speakers. And, for a long time, it
had no real competition. Today tech manufacturers
are queuing up to reveal these type of devices with
Alexa, Google Assistant or Cortana (Microsoft’s
offering) built in.