Gadgetory

hey how's it going Dave cutie here and this is a video on the Google home Mini and the Amazon echo dot so this thing just came out the Google home in E it's 50 bucks it's relatively inexpensive but it's just so much cheaper than its predecessor that thing was a hundred and twenty bucks I think this is like less than half price and it looks nice right but just because it's new and it looks a heck of a lot nicer than this it doesn't mean that's inherently better than this right I've been using this quite a bit the Amazon echo dot and it's a very good product but depending what you do and what you don't do one or the other might be a better fit so that's what this video is it's going to talk about what these products are what they aren't and I guess kind of a guide as to whether or not any one of these are actually a good purchase for you so I'm gonna focus on three things first let's talk about using these things as media controllers so they're both pretty good as media controllers this thing the Google home two things kind of bugged me about it it doesn't have an audio jack out so if you have a pair of speakers that you want to connect it to like a hardwire you can't do that and it also doesn't technically have bluetooth like it does you can't just connect it to a Bluetooth enabled speaker you need to connect a chromecast Audio to some speakers and then now they can talk wirelessly and I mean that's just a bit of a money grab from Google and they're just basically trying to keep the chromecast Audio product alive and it's fair but if you're looking for good audio and just like a simple audio with less wires and stuff like that it's gonna cost you a little bit more with this device with the Amazon echo dot it's got an audio out so it's just you plug it up and you're good to go both of them can be used as speakers the Google home minis probably a little bit better sounding it's not like much better because neither of them are very good but does sound a little bit cleaner and just a little more depth to the audio it does have upward firing speakers I'm not sure if that's making a big difference whereas the Amazon echo dot has downward firing speakers so when it's on a table it's just the sound is projected off of the surface they both handled TV well this thing needs chromecast this thing needs the fire stick V both have their advantages inherently just from the products of fire stick versus chromecast but they both work and I wouldn't say that one is like massively better than the other in terms of their video playing capabilities one thing I have noticed with the Google home products and it's not just with the Google home mini it's with all of the Google home products you can speak more naturally to them whereas the Amazon products you need to just hit those keywords for a bill to trigger the command that you're trying to make it do hey Google show me a video on youtube about overwatch alright playing on YouTube about overwatch videos from YouTube on office TV and because of that difference I find it easier and just more enjoyable to control my media using Google home products the one big advantage with this though and this probably won't apply to most people is that if you are an audiobook user or just more particularly audible this thing can do like text-to-speech and it can just read out stories which is super cool it's so simple I feel like this is something that Google homes should be able to do but it doesn't I use audible and I like audiobooks so yeah the next thing I want to talk about is using these devices as an assistant so either a home assistant or a work assistants or any kind of like voice operated assistant and both of them are pretty good but the winner to me is the Google home product this thing has just better connectivity for what I use so everyone's gonna be different I use a lot of Google services particularly Google Calendar and this is excellent for that tomorrow there are three things on your calendar the first one is at 12:30 a.m. and its title is busy stuff one Google home can distinguish between different voices so if you have one device in a household with different people in it they can ask it with their own voice and it'll react accordingly so if you have a different calendar from your wife or your family members it'll just read your calendar out to you and tell you your schedule and same thing with like making call so if you say or if I said hey Google call my mom it would call my mom but I said the same thing call my mom it would call her mom because our voices are different calling mom mobile now the Amazon echo dot is actually connected to even more services in particular Microsoft Outlook so if you're an Outlook user you got to go with this thing it doesn't even work on the Google home products when it comes to asking it questions and this is something that I don't use very frequently I mean it's very cool to kind of like trivia time but it's not something that I use regularly Google home crushes echo it's just not even close I want to say it's like 1 to 10 in terms of the number of questions that are answered it's just so much more robust in terms of its knowledgebase and a large part of that comes from the data collection Google has been collecting data for ever and I feel like it'll be really hard for Amazon to ever catch up in that regard hey Google do you like Siri you know Siri what a small world hope she's doing well now the one assistant type feature that Amazon is just amazing at is shopping because of Amazon's ecommerce power right now it's pretty good like if you need to refill something you can just request it and it shows up in your Amazon cart but I think the future of Amazon's eco products are going to revolve entirely around the whole ecommerce thing and that could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it but I really do think that's the future of Amazon now in terms of using these products as home automation I got to be completely honest I don't love home automation right now because I live in a relatively small condo it's like a small space home automation isn't that important to me there's like one large living space all the cool stuff that you can do with home automated stuff just is less appealing in such a small space but I recently got a house and I've been looking between these two to kind of see which will be better from home automation and surprisingly even though this is called Google home the Alexa products or the echo products are just so much better just they're able to connect to way more home automation stuff so if that's your jam if you're looking for home automation the echo products are the way to go but you can't go wrong with either of them they're both really inexpensive if you're looking for something that's aesthetically pleasing the Google home Mini looks nice and it's been answering questions making phone calls it's just not great as an audio controller because it lacks connectivity but the Amazon echo dot has a line out so it might be a little bit cheaper and better for music controls and it's gonna have better home automation connectivity so everything I've talked about so far is pertinent to right now in late 2017 and all it takes is Google or Amazon to just tweak a little bit of their software and these things suddenly have new functionality and new features and you don't have to buy new hardware right this is always gonna just have a speaker and a mic and a power source and it can do all of the stuff that we've talked about and it can do any future things that Google wants these things to do like doesn't do very much processing so yeah I mean these are so inexpensive 50 bucks you can definitely get into the game of whole home automation or just smart stuff and check it out okay hope you guys enjoyed this video thumbs we liked it subs we loved it see you guys next time