E-commerce giant Amazon dominated the e-book reader market as soon as they launched the Kindle. However, things got more serious when the company decided to venture out in different segments of the market, chiefly speaking, smart home speakers. The Jeff-Bezos led company launched its Amazon Echo and thus the latter became the first consumer electronics device that responds directly to the owner’s voice, thereby performing general functions.
The concept was new, however; was positively received by the mass as expected. Google then launched its Google Home – somewhat similar to Amazon’s Alexa and Echo. Here’s a quick comparison of both the Smart Devices and their primary features.
Alexa vs. Home
According to a report published by ZDNet, which put both the devices at the test, a stark difference between the responses of both the devices was noted. Both the smart home speakers were asked separate questions, and it was interesting to note how different their responses were. Moreover, more importantly, their sources differed too. Ideally, smart home speakers when asked a question, retrieve their answers from a pre-installed database.
For instance, Google Home would mostly turn to Google’s Knowledge Graph to search for a reply to the question asked. Or as for in Amazon’s Alexa’s case, the smart speaker would turn to a third-party source to retrieve the answer.
The test reportedly also checked what exactly happened when the smart home devices did not understand a particular query. There were two possibilities in such a case. Either the person would receive no response, or the subject would simply be provided with a wrong answer altogether. While it is unfair to check a smart home device’s actual ability, as they essentially depend on another source for the answer. But what is possible, is to test the amount of time taken by the two smart speakers to respond to the answer.
Both are great devices
It was discovered that as far as Google Home is concerned, it took far lesser time than Amazon Alexa to respond. In fact, as reported by ZDNet, Google Home apparently answered three times more questions than Amazon’s Alexa – which sure is a big difference. As far as the accuracy of the two smart devices are concerned, it was found that Google Home answered over eighty-nine per cent questions right and on the other hand, Amazon Alexa answered eighty-six per cent questions right. Both the smart devices come packed with an equal amount of features and are priced at almost similar prices.