How to choose a smart assistant for your home
Last week Amazon announced a brand-new range of smart speakers and displays. The Echo Buds ($169) allow Alexa to listen for commands while you’re out and about, and the $399 Echo Show 15 is a large screen with a camera, microphone and speakers you can install in your house to put up to-do lists, interact with Alexa, watch Amazon Prime, conduct video calls and monitor your family.
If you haven’t already jumped aboard, all this may have you asking if a smart assistant is right for your house, and if so which one is best. Assistants can be very useful, if you’re willing to give up some privacy. My family relies heavily on Siri for reminders, unit conversion, maths, the spelling of an occasional word, playing music, and as an intercom. It’s great for when you have your hands full, or if you’re in the middle of a task and don’t want to get out of the zone by moving to a different device or app. Others lean on Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa for similar tasks.
Amazon’s Echo Show 15 is a smart display you can hang on your wall.
Siri is the least tied to advertising, but the most device locked, as it will only work on Apple products. But the iPhone’s latest iOS 15 update means a lot of the Siri processing can be done on device, which allows you to choose whether your voice recordings ever go to the cloud.
Google Assistant is the most powerful. It’s built into most Android devices, but can also work across Apple devices and is installed in some TVs and audio equipment. It leverages everything Google has to offer, and thus is able to give you more information and be more playful. Your responses will likely be mined for Google Ad data, but so is basically everything you do with a Google product, so that might not matter to people who are heavily invested in the Google ecosystem.
Alexa is the most confusing of the three main players. It’s device agnostic, so you can install it on practically anything, which means it might be better for families with a mix of devices. But you also need to purposefully install “skills†for it to do anything. It could be great for people who really like to use Amazon products and services a lot, and don’t mind giving that much data to Bezos.
As for which of Amazon’s new devices are worth it, that’s hard to say judging them only on the details in the announcement. The Echo Buds could be great for Alexa fans who crave the convenience of “Hey Siri†or “OK Googleâ€, but on a cheaper, more Amazon-focused device.
The Echo Show 15 I’m less sold on. Yes, it’s a big screen, but for $100 more you could get an iPad, which is much more useful. Or for $250 less you could get a smaller Google Nest Hub and a whiteboard, which would do the same thing. It’s better value than the Echo Show 10 (also $399), but it’s going to be hard to justify the extra cash for a bigger screen that’s still too small to be a useful TV, even if it might make a very nice (if intense) digital photo frame.
In the end, choosing whether a smart assistant is right for you is a very personal choice. It’s worth testing them all out on your phone for free first to see which one you like more before investing in the ecosystem.