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Google Home Is 6 Times More Likely To Answer Your Question Than Amazon Alexa (adweek.com)
According to software developed by New York-based 360i, Google Home is six times more likely to answer your question than Amazon Alexa -- its biggest competitor. Adweek reports: It's relatively surprising, considering that RBC Capital Markets projects Alexa will drive $10 billion of revenue to Amazon by 2020 -- not to mention the artificial intelligence-based system currently owns 70 percent of the voice market. 360i's proprietary software asked both devices 3,000 questions to come to the figure. While Amazon Alexa has shown considerable strength in retail search during the agency's research, Google won the day thanks to its unmatched search abilities.
I use it all the time. I use it for timers, and for turning some lights on and off. Sometimes I play music through it, but not often. I also ask for the weather. I don't use it for anything else.
The timers suck. I can't say 'Set a reminder at X for Blah" such that it'll tell me "Blah" at X time. It only chimes. It makes an incredibly annoying distinction between an alarm and a timer such that you can tell it to cancel all alarms; it says 'you have no alarms' and then five minutes alter your TIMER goes off, and it bleeps.
The music stuff sucks. It constantly tries to upsell you on the service. It constantly gets the wrong music and doesn't LEARN from what you say. So you can say you want My Way, by the Sex Pistols 20 times, and when you just ask for My Way without specifying, it's gonna give you Seth Macfarland. And it's only gonna play 10 seconds and then tell you to subscribe to Amazon Music Unlimited. If the title of your song is in not in English, woe unto you -- Alexa will never find it, no matter how carefully you feed it details. Try asking for anything by Sonora Dinamita.
The Echo is, simply put, a piece of shit. And not just plain shit, it's offensive up-selling shit.
But I STILL use it, because a voice interface is so dang convenient. (The weather function is actually FINE.)
Echo isn't the market leader because it answers your questions well, it's the leader because people have them because they've been on the market more than a year already. Same with Siri -- It also sucks monkeys, though at least it doesn’t try to upsell you. People have Siri because they have iPhones. Nobody would want Siri if there could be competition in that space.
These products are here because the voice area is so obviously something we want, and all the initial products are dropping the ball hilariously. When someone comes out with an actually good product, all this early stuff is going in the dumpster overnight.
I'm hoping Hound or some other small company will get it right and be bought by Google and shoved everywhere. If Amazon buys 'em they'll convert it into a unusable up-selling tool again.