Looking at Echo and Google Home

Today's not very conducive to blogging. Nevertheless.

Amazon and Google have been having a lot of sales lately for their Echo and Google Home products. I almost bought an Amazon Echo Dot(Alexa) for $19.99, but I didn't feel comfortable with it. Not for any logical reason. It was more like that little voice saying maybe not. I listened to it and did more research. This article has a small graph of accuracy measurements in a test of various digital assistants that were asked over 800 questions. Google was 87.9% accurate and understood 100% of the questions. Alexa was 72.5% accurate and understood 99% of the questions. Siri was irrelevant, since I never buy any Apple products whatsoever. I already have Cortana on my PC.

Cortana is the reason I was looking at digital assistants to begin with. I have Cortana. I like Cortana. I just can't get it to keep working. I rarely shut my computer down. My habit is to put it in Sleep mode instead, because I always have multiple browser windows with multiple tabs open. I like being able to pick up where I left off the night before. The problem is that Cortana goes into Suspended mode during Sleep and doesn't want to wake up even after restarting the Cortana process. I finally gave up. I need something that works.

Accuracy isn't the only factor. Digital assistants do more than answer questions and tell the weather. After a lot of reading, it kind of comes down to this. Alexa is great for people in the Amazon ecosystem who consume media and buy off Amazon and probably have Prime. Google Home is great for more informational type needs. Both are good for home automation, which is something I want. I have an air purifier and plugin heaters, etc., that it would be nice to be able to tell to turn on and off from another room. It would be nice to be able to control lamps with a voice command or have the lights come on as I'm coming up the driveway instead of having to leave a light on.

I ended up ordering a Google Home Mini 2-pack and one smart plug to test. Finding a smart plug without a lot of bad reviews was almost impossible. It seems quite a lot of them work for a while then die. This one had only 5% bad reviews, which is great for any product. I ordered it. We'll see. It should all arrive by the end of next week or early the week after, depending on holidays and how many orders there are and the perils of free shipping. I'll have more to say about how it works, assuming it works, in a few weeks.

Have a great weekend.