Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Home Pod vs Echo Plus vs Google Home – Smart Speaker Comparison”.
Hey, what’s up folks how’s it going. This is waj hope you guys are all doing well. So back in 2014, amazon released the first generation echo and it kind of changed the whole industry. It introduced a new product called a smart speaker which is typically something that is centrally located in your house.
You can ask a general question, so it’s kind of like a voice assistant. It had a pretty decent built-in speaker, so it’s great for streaming in music and different audio content, and it’s really easy to control your smart devices in your house, whether that be smart appliances, switches and so on and so forth. So it made a home automation a lot more accessible to several.
Several thousands of people now fast forward to 2018. Both google and apple have a main competitor for amazon, but what we’re gon na do is a three-way shootout between the latest generation of the amazon, echo plus the google home, as well as the apple homepod. So we’re going to take a look at each device, see what the advantages and disadvantages are and determine whether one of these smart speakers is going to be ultimately right for you to actually use on a daily consistent basis.
So, if you’re interested, let’s get right into it, now we’re going to break this comparison down into three different categories: we’re going to first take a look at the audio quality of each of the built-in speakers. Secondly, is the voice assistant, integration and technology? And, thirdly, is the compatibility of different smart home devices now? Firstly, let’s just briefly go over the design of the home pod. You can see it’s a lot bigger than the other two devices it actually measures about 172, millimeters in terms of height and about 142 millimeters. In terms of diameter – and it weighs about 2.5 kilograms, so you definitely need to pick it up with two hands when you’re transporting it. Now inside you have a built-in a8 chip which was formerly inside the iphone 6, so actually using a full smartphone processor to power. A speaker, so it’s pretty darn powerful now much like the echo plus the homepod, delivers sound from a all-encompassing 360 degree standpoint.
It’S comprised of seven tweeters inside. You also have a four inch woofer to handle all your low end frequencies and even though the echo plus actually sounds pretty decent. It actually has a single speaker.
That’S comprised of a downward facing two and a half inch woofer and a 0.8 inch tweeter and it delivers sound up pretty decently, even in a large space, but compared to the home pod. There is absolutely no competition, the low end, a punch that you get and the overall deeper frequencies is a lot more substantial and with the seven tweeter array, you’re going to get a level of definition and clarity from the high end spectrum. That is simply not going to be present in the echo plus. Another neat little feature on the homepod is that it’ll actually actively adapt to the physical setting that you place it in. So if you have it alongside a wall, it’ll actually modify the speaker configuration so it fires in more of the open space and eliminates reflection to better amplify the noise and to kind of fill the room up better and vice versa. If you have it in a more open space, it’s going to fire more uniformly to fill that space up more efficiently and to get the best audio performance in that setting now for pure music listening experience, the google home the standard version that we have over here Is a decent little wi-fi speaker, the audio quality is again fairly passable, but certainly not going to be a very hi-fi listening experience and if you’re a music enthusiast, you probably want to opt for the google home max, which offers the same assistant capabilities but with better Audio quality that is more comparable to what you’re going to find on the homepod.
Now, as we’ve established, the homepod is a great speaker, but the problem really lies with the back end: the streaming side of things it’s exclusively designed to be used with apple music, which is certainly understandable from an apple ecosystem standpoint. But what, if you’re a subscriber to other services like pandora and spotify, you’re kind of out of luck? If you don’t want to just use apple airplay to stream from your iphone to your home pod? And if you actually want to use your voice to play different songs, you’re stuck with just apple music, on the homepod, now with the other two speakers, you have full support for third-party streaming services like pandora and spotify, and with the google home. You can certainly use the google music subscription a service, and on top of that, you can connect your smartphone or tablet via bluetooth to both of these speakers to stream music directly, which is sadly not supported on the homepod. So if you have an android phone or tablet – and you want to stream some music via bluetooth to the homepod you’re out of luck there now moving on.
Let’S talk about the voice assistant capabilities of these speakers now we’re going to first start out with the star of the show, which definitely has to be google home. It’S using google’s assistant ai, which has access to google’s over 17 years of search experience, which is pretty much unbeatable. At this point. It also takes advantage of different wikipedia articles. It utilizes a location based news, weather and business information, and the google assistant is also conversational. So if you want to ask it a follow-up question that relates to the previous question, you just asked it’s smart enough to do so versus with siri and alexa. They really prefer.
You ask one question at a time and they don’t really remember what you’ve asked previously. So, from a purely knowledge, encyclopedic standpoint, the google home is certainly ahead of the other two, but in terms of just performing just simple personal tasks such as setting a timer making a note, checking the news, traffic or weather alexa and siri have those things covered pretty Well now, one obvious advantage on the echo is since it’s being made by the biggest ecommerce website on the planet. It’S certainly going to have the biggest shopping advantages, so you can basically sync it up with your prime membership and it’ll kind of learn on what products you typically like to buy on there, and it knows your history, so you can reorder commonly ordered products. You can even order and search up at different products and i’ll give you some limited options. Uh and it’ll even add to your cart and you can place the order just using your voice.
It’S still pretty limited, it’s not going to replace the full website, but it is a step in the right direction and a pretty cool one. Nonetheless, now, let’s talk about the smart home integrations on all three of these products, starting with the apple home pod, which is going to primarily rely on apple’s, homekit sdk that has been around for a couple of years, initially designed for the ios platform. So there’s a decent amount of devices out there that will work with the home pod straight off the bat, but the list is still quite short compared to the devices that the echo supports. Since it’s been out since 2014. There’S a pretty mature list of smart home enabled devices that will work straight off the bat with the amazon platform and google has a pretty substantial list of compatible devices as well, but in terms of overall integration and ease of use.
I definitely have to give the execution to the echo plus. It actually has a built-in smart hub. So, for example, you can take this uh led hue light from philips plug it in directly into any socket, and it has a built-in wi-fi chip that will directly talk.
Uh to the echo plus and just using your voice itself, it will set up everything without the use of a smartphone which is really convenient and handy and for the time being, the other two platforms are reliant on a third-party application. So, therefore, if you have a new smart home device that you want to connect to your homepod or google home you’re, pretty much always going to have to use your smartphone or tablet to make that connection happen, which is not the case with the echo plus on The amazon side and pretty much amazon has the best integration out there. You can sync up garage door, openers your locks on your door itself, curtains, etc, etc. You can pretty much automate your entire house with just a single echo and command everything with just your voice. So that’s pretty darn impressive, and currently i have a project lined up right now, where i’m fully automating a house with just using the amazon echo and having full control over all the amenities, with just using your voice, so stay tuned for the channel. For that video, which should be pretty fun now to kind of sum up everything we’ve talked about, i think there’s clear winners in each category, based on my experience from an audio standpoint, definitely the apple homepod has the home feel advantage.
It certainly has the largest woofer and a tweeter array. It sounds really nice and premium it’s up there with some of the nicer kind of all-in-one sound systems that you’re going to use for listening to music or podcasts or whatever. So it’s a great overall speaker and definitely the best out of the other two.
Now, when it comes to the smart home standpoint and kind of integrating everything in more of an all-inclusive way and certainly from an experience standpoint, amazon definitely has the advantage over here with the echo plus it’s great for controlling all sorts of different devices and they’re. Actually, the ones that first came out with this type of product, so you’re going to see that most of the ecosystem of smart home devices are going to be very compatible with the echo platform. The voice recognition system is awesome and obviously, from a shopify standpoint.
Amazon. Definitely has the advantage there now from a voice assistant standpoint. I would definitely say that the clear winner has to be the google home. Essentially, you have the decade a long experience that google has when it comes to search.
So it’s a very powerful and cohesive system. That’S getting smarter and smarter every day, and if you want to ask specific questions, i think that you’re going to get the most reliable and consistent and probably the most in-depth information from the google assistant and the other two are good. I would certainly say that the amazon echo plus, is a close second and uh siri, although fairly good for general questions is still far behind of what google has to bring to the table when it comes to using it as a voice assistant now uh, you guys Be the judge uh these products are still fairly new, especially the apple homepod has a lot of maturity and is still quite far behind the other two in terms of wide spectrum device, compatibility and uh. We’Re gon na see how these things mature up and see. If people are gon na actually adopt this on a more mass mainstream perspective, so stay tuned. We’Re gon na have a fallout video to see how these devices mature and if you have any specific questions, let me know. Definitely let me know what you guys prefer in the comment section down below give us a thumbs up. If you like this video and we’ll see you in the next one, take .