Alexa vs google home which to choose?

[brockp]

I’m a longtime UD user but we are looking at getting Alexa or google home doe voice control. 
 

which do you recommend as an ecosystem to connect to UD or have in general?

 

thanks

[bmercier]

24 minutes ago, brockp said:

I’m a longtime UD user but we are looking at getting Alexa or google home doe voice control. 
 

which do you recommend as an ecosystem to connect to UD or have in general?

 

thanks

My recommendation would be Alexa.

I developed both the Alexa skill and Google Home action, and I can tell you the integration is slighty more advanced with Alexa. We also have significantly more customers using Alexa than GH.

 

[xlurkr]

I’m currently using both - Alexa at home and Google in my remote job apartment.  I agree with @bmercier.  You can read  about one of my Google frustrations in the Google forum.  That forum only gets about one post a month on average, and not a lot of responses.

Not stated in there is that I get relatively frequent (maybe 1 out of 10 or 20 times) responses of “Something went wrong.  Try again in a few seconds”, or no response at all.

-Tom

[larryllix]

Alexa! I have half a dozen GH devices in my junk box and after using both I found GH made too many mistakes by using assumptions on what you said and what you meant to say.

In the beginning AFAIC, GH was way ahead of amazon but later the Alexa speakers seemed to surpass GH and I discontinued usage of mine.

Now I only use Alexa speakers, however their original intent seems to be slowly sliding into place, as they start to slip advertising into your home. You can disable most of the annoyances but, like every other business, they upgrade the software with new features and always enable them until you get annoyed enough to find the new option and disable it. We're just renting this equipment and have no rights to say what goes on it. LOL

As another note: Amazon speakers (not the version 1) have another band they support and may attempt to allow outside connections to your WiFi service. Last I looked you can turn that feature off. It tries to create a network using two frequencies, 800 MHz and 400MHz. I can detect both on a scanner, when that feature is enabled.

WE have been asking for a lot of language translations lately and the Amazon Show has been very useful showing the text along with the pronunciation. 8" is the smallest you want as the 5" is almost unreadable like a cell phone across the room would be.

[brockp]

thanks everyone.  Personally I work in an area i wanted to keep devices like this out for privacy reasons.  Whyt i used UD and insteon in the first place.  But slowly Im getting requested for features from others in my house I should figure it out.

 

Thanks