Which is the best voice assistant? Amazon Echo or Google Home?

[techie]

Voice assistants are the new rage nowadays. It's part of race to the dominance of Artificial intelligence (AI). AI is nothing new. It's a different name for neural networks which were pretty popular in late 80s. (I remember talking to college seniors about that, with eyes wide open!)

What is voice assistant? It's a device that responds to your voice commands. You cant say (not yet) "open sesame", but you can ask for weather, flight information, latest news, etc., There is a couple of voice assistants in the market. Out of these Amazon Echo and Google Home are popular.

Amazon Echo (Alexa): This is a great voice assistant created by Amazon. It works flawlessly and has many apps. It's the pioneer of voice assistance and innovation!



Amazon recently introduced echo show, which is upgrade of echo with visual display.



Google Home: Google introduced this late last year to catch up with Amazon Echo. Google did this out of fear. If everyone searches thru Echo, Google will be out of business. So, google has to create a voice assistant to match with Amazon.



Out of above two, I like Amazon Echo better mainly because (a) it has good app eco system; there are so many apps in different domain and languages (b) cost. you can get echo dot for $49, echo for $99+. Google home costs $149+ but has limited amount of apps so far. For these voice assistants, you dont need to necessarily buy the above devices. You can get Alexa (Echo) thru amazon app (with limited apps). Similarly, google home is available in most of Android phones also with limited home apps.

Rumour has is that Apple is creating voice assistant device with "Siri" in place. Samsung is playing catch up as well. It's going to be an interesting race for voice assistant dominance.