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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

And those employees are doing a rather poor job on the AI side of things. Hardware itself is OK, it hears me better than its Google counterpart thanks to the phased microphone array. But both speech recognition and natural language understanding are piss poor and other than ordering stuff from Amazon and setting the time it's not useful for much, nor does it understand me in a sufficiently high percentage of interactions, nor is it in any way "conversational", the way Google Home is. Alexa app is also lackluster and feels like it's held together by duct tape, like all other Amazon apps.

For me the quality of AI in this case outweighs the creep factor of Google. FWIW, I replaced my Echo with a Google Home Mini.

Full disclosure: I'm an ex-Googler who nevertheless thinks that ads are cancer, and pervasive tracking shouldn't be legal.

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I've used both pretty heavily. We just gave away all our google home's except one and all our mini's.

Natural language voice recognition is better on google home. No question there - it's flat out better. I found google smarter.

But some deal breaker negatives. I basically want a totally predictable / reliable system. I don't need smarts, I need something useful (honestly, most commands to these things are probably weather, alarm/calendar, music etc).

The google app in a multi-person household does not work - sharing / inviting others to manage the house is totally broken. There is some kind of eventually consistency issue somewhere and the internal state gets terribly messed up. Maybe your partner is not into the automation as much as you are are, BUT if you give them the app with total control so they can see / do more, they will be more into it.

Some core features for most folks are things like what is on my calendar, set a timer etc. I'm a heavy google user, and I cannot get it to handle my google apps calendar. It's a known limitation. I can get alexa to handle my google calendar! Read here for more: https://support.google.com/assistant/thread/222810?hl=en

Let that sink in. ALEXA CAN handle my google calendar. Google CANNOT! Talk about a surprise when you are setting things up, I was convinced I had done something wrong.

This runs through things. The alexa tech is more limited, but they are more customer oriented, listen more. With google, even if it's the #1 request for literally years, and seems obvious (ie, google home should be able to read the events from the google calendar which is under the exact login used for the app) it is flat out ignored. They are simply not customer facing.

Another example I don't care about. Folks kept asking for apple music support on alexa. Amazon ultimately did what apple wanted to get music on alexa, even if it impacted amazon.com etc (ie, seem to have cracked down on fake apple products etc). Even though this was an apple limitation, amazon basically spent time to solve this for users.

Alexa routines are a lot of fun, worth checking out if you haven't.

And a tip -> give amazon some feedback, I've seen them listen.

You should have said "G Suite calendar". Technically I suppose it's "Google" calendar, so you're not wrong, but a number of things aren't really available on G Suite, which Google positions as their "business" offering. And a lot of other things aren't available on consumer GMail. That's probably why you're having issues adding others to a family group.

Should it be available? I suppose it should. But it's not really a problem for 99.99% of their users. The rest can use Alexa. :-)

I switched our company to google - I’m someone heavily in the google ecosystem and not supported by google.

Alexa does support me even though I don’t pay them for email. This is just one point, but illustrates the point.

Google has better tech, but weird product delivery approach. And I moved to AWS from google compute for a similar set of reasons.

Google works very simply on the inside: you get rewarded for launching _new_ impressive stuff. You rarely if ever get rewarded for fixing old and busted _existing_ stuff.

Whether the newly launched stuff is suitable for the user is a tertiary concern. So yeah, no disagreement there, Google is not very user-focused, and has never been. But they're so far ahead technologically that in a lot of cases I'm willing to forgive them their ADHD.

That would totally explain this! I'm often like, this tech is amazing. But wait, this doesn't even work with this other thing it should work with. It's definitely the fix / polish / integrate corner cases.

Google+ was a nightmare as well with youtube and other services - again, I was like how are you listening to users with these approaches.

> ads are cancer

> pervasive tracking shouldn't be legal

> I replaced my Echo with a Google Home Mini

Huh?

I'm ok with Google knowing what I do on Google. I'm not OK with Google knowing what I do everywhere else. Home does not have ads. If it ever gets them, it'll go straight into the bin.

I have a few Echos that we bought a year ago over Christmas. We use it to play music and control home automation. It works relatively well. My husband has a thick russian accent, and with him it struggles sometimes.

I don't use the app and so have no use for that. What are other things the Google home does better? Like help me understand the use case. You say Google Home is more "conversational", but how?

You can mostly speak to it like you'd speak to a human, and in the vast majority of cases it will understand. No need for rigid commands. You can also ask clarifying questions and it will keep context. Its speech synthesis and response language is more "human" and "cheerful". I just wish it also had an echo-like microphone array. When it's playing music it sometimes can be difficult to get it to hear commands.

Previous Echo models had the same issue with music. The latest Echo model will lower the music volume when it hears the wake word.

Alexa can make phone calls that dial a landline number, which is not an option with Google.

> The latest Echo model will lower the music volume when it hears the wake word.

I got my Echo a while ago before the current generation was even announced. It would always lower the volume as soon as it hears the wake word.

Then it was only Echo v1 which didn't have this feature.

Hrm? Google Home can make calls (uses the google voice # of the account paired to it).

Echo can use a landline for the outbound call.

How is this better than the Google Home/Google Voice integration? Seems significantly more complex, and reliant on the end user having a working home phone line

Echo can dial (VOIP) without a landline, same as Google Voice/Home.

If you have a landline and want your outbound Echo calls to have the same caller ID as the landline (so that people can return/screen calls), then Echo is the only option for voice dialing.

I have both a Google home and Amazon echo literally next to each other. I have found that the Amazon device is really poor at hearing you.

The Google device I can talk to from any room in my apartment and it hears me correctly 95% of the time, it even triggers and understands me if I am brushing my teeth with an electronic toothbrush at the same time. It is impressive.

The Amazon device on the other hand has a 50/50 chance of triggering, and I often have to walk right up to it to clearly enunciate "computer" before it wakes up. Not sure if this because I speak en-gb instead of en-us.

(I have both only because the Google one does not reliably work with Samsung smartthings any more (it used to work fine!) but the Amazon one does. Amazon one is also good for music but Google tries to sell you a YouTube subscription. Google one is hugely better at random day to day questions/queries/translation/usefulness etc - I guess that is b cause they are a search engine and not an e-commerce site)

Even Amazon's music search sucks. It can never find the song unless you provide an accurate name. Its fuzzy matching sucks too, doesn't even account for regional trend in songs.

Apple's music search sucks too, especially if your music tastes are even slightly outside the mainstream. It simply doesn't personalize per user, so when I search, I have to wade through a list of unfamiliar band and musician names until I type almost the whole thing. For a company whose motto once upon a time was "design is how it works", this is inexcusable.

I found that small positioning changes can make a big difference with my Echo -- it used to be on the a kitchen counter in a small corner formed by a beam, I had to be close and very clearly enunciate "Alexa" to get it to wake up. One day after cleaning the counter, I put it out in front of the beam instead of the corner, and it was a night and day difference, it could suddenly hear me across the room.

I'd be interested to know what team in Google you were in. Most Googlers who design and use systems that interact with private user data come to trust them...

I’ve only used an Echo and I’m definitely interested in hearing how the user experience of the Google Home is better. How is it more conversational?

You can get most of the experience with the Assistant app which is available for both ios and android.

Search-related portions are available through that "microphone" icon (which nobody clicks) on Google.com front page. The main trick that makes it conversational is you can usually ask it a question about somebody or something, and then ask follow up questions using pronouns and without referencing the entity in question directly, much like you would with a human. Try e.g. "what's the population of Seattle", then "when was it founded", then "in what state is it", etc. Eventually this breaks down, but it mostly works on the first and second follow-up question. I.e. "is Costco open right now", then "how long would it take me to get there".

From an AI practitioner: this is god-mode level work.

> Search-related portions are available through that "microphone" icon (which nobody clicks)

I've noticed no one my age clicks this. My son and his friends as well as a friends nieces and nephews who live a couple thousand miles away from us use Google in a completely different way. They don't go to google.com and type in a search query, they click the microphone and ask google their question directly. They are also more likely to use the assistant on their devices than any of the adults I know. I think this is one of those generational shifts as they don't need to be able to type in their queries in the best way to get the results they are looking for, they can just use natural language for the most part.

Yes, a significant fraction of _mobile_ searches on Google are voice. According to Google it was 20% in 2016, the number has likely gone up significantly since then. Even old farts like myself are getting on the bandwagon, this is no longer early-adopter stuff.

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+fraction+of+google+sear...

Just tried it:

"What is one plus one?" "2"

"Plus one?" <Random movie reference>

"Add one to that?" "I don't understand"

"Add that to one?" "3"

Feels like an old text adventure.

This is my experience with Google Home. Haven't tried others.

It is almost always somewhere between faster and much faster to pull out my phone, switch app, type, than to waken up the device, ask it, wait for an excuse, rephrase my question and wait for it to read it.

That said it shows promise and if I still trusted Google I'd be somewhat enthusiastic :-| (Now I'm mostly scared.)

Since I do not trust them I have it in my office and turn the mic off when I'm not experimenting with it.

Next up: figure out if that mic is actually disabled in hardware if I "turn it off".

@Googlers: a good step forward wrt trust would be to allow the semi paranoid ones like me to turn on the mic on my phone on demand. I can live with the annoyance of tapping some button three times or whatever.

After China and a bunch of other stuff I do not trust you to value your relationship with your customers over your relationship with your bank.

I concur. For me it's similar wrt. annoyance/efficiency factor, but I have the opposite needs in terms of the microphone. I don't use my phone's Google Assistant because there are only two workflows where I would find it useful, and I can get neither of them to work.

Workflow one is leaving it on a desk and having it listen for the hotword all the time. No "screen must be unlocked" or "phone must be charging" nonsense; if I have to come to the desk and fiddle with the phone, I'll do what I need faster with my fingers. Workflow two is always listening when I'm on a Bluetooth headset. I can accept pressing a button on the headset to turn it on, but again, if I have to fiddle with my phone to get it to listen, it defeats the entire purpose of the tool.

(I'm also an old curmudgeon that is convinced speech recognition can be done entirely off-line, and there's no direct reason to send voice data to the mothership. But I guess it's fighting with windmills at this point.)

> I'm an ex-Googler who nevertheless thinks that ads are cancer

Just curious: did this opinion about ads formed before, during or after you worked at Google?

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