Google Home review – in pictures
With more and more voice assistants hitting the market, we put the Google Home under the microscope...
WHERE THE HEART IS
The future is a glorious place, where plutonium-powered smartphones never need charging, and personal AI butlers serve us with unfaltering loyalty, tending to our every whim. The first baby steps to the latter began around five years ago, when the likes of Siri and Google Now began listening to our basic commands, setting alarms and sending garbled voice-dictated messages, but we’ve come a long way since then. AI-powered speakers like the Amazon Echo and Google Home are now infiltrating our homes, turning on our lights, playing our music, and turning up the heating. With the Amazon Echo impressing us with its soothing voice and home automation smarts, we were looking forward to Google Home’s UK debut. Here’s how it stacks up in the battle to become your house’s invisible servant.
MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE
Y’know those automated, battery-powered air fresheners that insultingly puff out a whiff of lavender whenever you walk by? Yeah, Google Home looks a lot like one of those. That’s no bad thing, mind. Its angled, cylindrical top and rounded base give it a handsome, modern, and unobtrusive look, which is exactly the sort of thing we want to see. AI butlers should be heard and not seen, after all. Home also has the advantage of a removable base, with seven different finishes and colour options available to buy separately, letting it blend in with its surroundings even more. Whether you’ll prefer it to the Echo, which is twice its height and more noticeable, is down to personal preference. We certainly do.
I BELIEVE IN TOUCH
Unlike Echo, which has a physical volume ring that lights up like the bottom of a rude boy’s modded Vauxhall Nova, Home’s main controls are purely touch-sensitive. A circle of LEDs hide just beneath the top surface, and a quick circular swipe in either direction lowers and raises the volume. Taps pause and resume your music, too. You can also long-press the top to wake up Google Assistant too, but where’s the fun in that when you can summon her from across the room?
OK GOOGLE
Google’s AI assistant can be summoned with two hot phrases – ‘OK Google’ and ‘Hey Google’. Both are annoyingly awkward to say, though we’ve settled on the latter. The Echo’s ‘Alexa’ is is quicker and easier to say and, unlike Home, you can choose from four wake words, including ‘Computer’. The day we can get either of them to respond to ‘Kif’ will be a happy one indeed. If you like the familiarity of a plummy British accent, you’ll be pleased to hear that the UK version comes with a new voice in that style. Which is good, because we found Google Assistant’s American voice to sound a bit more jarring and synthetic, although maybe that’s just us being biased. You can still choose the American voice if you prefer, we won’t judge.
SOUNDS GOOD
Currently, Google Home supports four music services in the US – Google Play Music, Spotify, YouTube Music and Pandora – though only the first two are available in the UK. You can set all of these up in the Home app, and select which one you want to have as the default. Once that’s done, it’s just a case of asking Home to play a specific song, artist or album. More often than not, it’ll reward you with exactly what you’re after. Magic. You can also play, pause, and adjust the volume without having to lift a finger. Another big plus over the Amazon Echo is Home’s support for multi-room audio. If you have either Chromecast Audio-connected speakers or one of the increasing number of Google Cast-comptaible devices, the Home app lets you group them together and synchronise music from the likes of Spotify. It works really well.
SPACE ODDITY
Unlike Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant is a little smarter when it comes to searches too. Ask it to play “that Enya song from Lord of the Rings”, for example, and it’ll trawl through the movie’s soundtrack until it finds an artist match. Clever stuff. Home does fall short in some areas though. If you’re using Spotify as your music service, you can add songs to your library, or to specific playlists – an incredibly useful feature if you’re discovering new music to add to your collection. Oddly though, that’s not true if you’re using Google’s own Play Music service instead. That seems like a gigantic omission to us.
AUDIO BULLY
We never expected Google Home to match the likes of a Sonos speaker for sound quality, but we’re still a little disappointed in its performance. Music on the Home sounds a little muffled, especially if you’re cranking out a song with a lot of bass. While Home can get loud enough to fill a room, we soon learnt to stay away from max volume to avoid the distortion that creeps in. You’re better off with a proper set of speakers connected to a Chromecast Audio device, letting Home act as a voice control relay for it. This is a particularly good setup, as it’s now possible to make a voice-controlled, multi-room system using these components (as well as any device that supports Google Cast).
NATURAL ABILITY
One of Home’s most impressive party tricks, and the thing that sets it apart from Amazon’s Echo, is how it plays nicely with Google Chromecast devices. If you’ve got a Chromecast hooked up to your TV, you can use Home to fire up YouTube videos directly to your big screen, without having to go via your phone or laptop. Even better, it will now do the same for Netflix. Home’s natural search skills also come into play here. If you ask it to play a trailer for the latest Pixar movie (because you’ve forgotten the name), it’s clever enough to work out what you’re after, before serving it to you in seconds. Being able to come in after a long day and start watching your favourite programme before you’ve even landed on the couch will be a game-changer for lazy gadgeteers.
SMART HOME
If having Drake’s latest music video pop up on the telly simply by asking has blown your gran’s mind, she’s really going to need a sherry once you show off Home’s smart home shenanigans. Home’s voice commands work well. It’s so much more convenient to simply ask Nest to crank up the heating to a specific temperature or turn the lights on or off without having to whip out your phone, open up an app, and tap a button. So, as long as you’ve got the compatible tech, Home’s smart home controls will genuinely make your life just that little bit easier.
QUESTION TIME
Amazon’s Alexa can answer basic questions, but Home goes above and beyond, often providing you with supplemental information taken from the top search results. Ask Alexa whether or not insects have brains for example, and she’ll have no idea what you’re talking about. Pitch the same question to Google Assistant though, and not only will it tell you that yes, they do, it will go into more detailed information regarding how they’re less developed and not as important, and that some species can even survive with their heads detached, should the conditions be right. Of course you can chuck a bunch of sums and ‘what movie did so and so star in’ questions at Home, and it’ll handle them easily too, but it’s the questions which answer your childlike curiosity in which Home really shines.
RECOGNISE ME?
A new feature recently turned Google Home into the best smart assistant for families – or at least, households of people who are all fans of Google’s services. Rather cleverly, Home can differentiate between the voices of up to six different people, allowing it to bring in personalised preferences and information, just from the voice pattern in the way you say ‘Hey Google’. All it takes is a couple of minutes of voice training in the Home app. Each person will need the Google Home app, but from there they can add their calendar, tweak news sources for a ‘My day’ summary, and connect their music services. This is a pretty big advantage over the Amazon Echo. On the Echo you can connect multiple accounts under a household profile, but this then means shared calendars and to do lists. You can also add separate accounts, but because the Echo doesn’t yet have voice recognition, you have to ask Alexa to switch between them.
THE FINAL VERDICT?
In many ways, Google Home is amazing. It’s the all-in-one J.A.R.V.I.S.-like butler we’ve dreamt of for years. Well, almost. Its smart home controls are no gimmick – it really will make your daily life just that little bit easier, to the point where using anything but your voice to set the temperature or dim the lights will seem archaic. Its music controls, when using Spotify and TuneIn to listen to the radio also work well, and Google Assistant’s clever natural language search is great at finding songs. And yet, the key word here (for the Echo too), is potential. Home itself is just a vessel for Google Assistant, which will only get better and better as time goes on – without you having to do anything. As Google tweaks and improves its AI baby, Home will get smarter, gain more features, and become more and more useful.
