Google Home officially goes on sale today. $129, available at the Google Store, Best Buy, Walmart, and apparently some Verizon stores now sell speakers, which is its own small sign of the times. Ive been half-following this thing since Google announced it back at I/O in May, mostly because I already have an Amazon Echo Dot sitting on my kitchen counter and I keep asking myself what problem a second one of these actually solves for me.
Heres where Im at with the Dot, for context. I bought it in the spring for something like $50 during one of Amazons weird flash sales, half expecting it to become a novelty I used twice and forgot about, like that Jawbone speaker I still have in a drawer somewhere. Instead it turned into the thing that sets my pasta timer and tells me if its going to rain before I walk the dog. Thats it. Thats the whole use case. Im not asking it to order me paper towels and Im definitely not letting it near my calendar.
So when I read through what Google is pitching with Home, the pitch is basically "ours is smarter because its Google and Google already knows everything about you." Which, fine, thats probably true in some narrow technical sense, Google Search has twenty years of being better at answering the kind of question you'd actually yell across a room ("how many tablespoons in a quarter cup" type stuff). Amazon built the Echo around commerce first and assistant second, and it shows if you ask Alexa anything that isnt a shopping list or a timer, you get a shrug in speaker form half the time.
But heres my actual complaint, and its not really about either product specifically, its about the two of them existing at the same time in the same category. Im now supposed to decide which company gets to run the microphone in my house? Because thats what this is. Its not a speaker purchase, its picking a walled garden and moving in. If I buy Home, my Spotify and my calendar and my smart lights all need to play nice with Google's ecosystem instead of Amazon's, and if either company decides to be petty about supporting the other ones stuff (and both of them have already been petty about this kind of thing, see: no YouTube on Echo Show devices for years), Im the one who bought a $129 paperweight.
I dont think Im buying one today, for what its worth. Not because I think its a bad product, from what Ive read the far-field mic array is apparently really good and it can pick your voice up from across a loud room, which the Dot genuinely struggles with if the dishwasher is running. Its more that I dont have a second problem for it to solve. One assistant answering "whats 400 degrees in celsius" while Im cooking is plenty. Two of them arguing over which wake word gets triggered when I say "hey" too loudly is not an upgrade, its a headache waiting to happen, and I say this as someone who has genuinely stood in his kitchen and had both a phone assistant and a speaker assistant respond to the same sentence at once. Its not charming. Its annoying.
The bigger thing I keep chewing on, and Ill probably write more about this later in the year once Home has been out for a bit and reviews settle, is how fast "smart speaker" went from a weird gadget-blog curiosity to something Walmart sells next to the crockpots. Two years ago the Echo was this odd invite-only thing nobody quite understood. Now theres a second major company shipping a competing hardware SKU into the exact same $130ish price bracket, on the exact same day it seems like every tech outlet has a review embargo lifting. Thats a fast category to mature, or at least a fast category for two giant companies to decide is worth fighting over.
Anyway. If you end up grabbing one today, Im curious how the voice recognition compares in a noisy room, because thats the one thing that actually makes or breaks these things for me day to day. Everything else is more or less the same feature set wearing a different company's logo.