Which one to buy, Amazon Echo or Google Home speaker?

Hi,
I would like to implement speaker with voice control to my Node-RED project and I cannot decide which one to buy.
Which one is better? Which one I should buy?
Give me Pros and Cons like answer, please.

Cons: both listen actively to your life.

1 Like

So what would be the better solution?

No, they listen for a specific keyword - as long as the device does not handle a request, no audio data is sent...
If you are paranoid about privacy, you should not use it - but your surely also dont use a mobile phone, which is far more intrusive as the speakers (cause you carry it with you and it has in addition to the microphone also camera, gps, gyroscope and other sensors)

I would go for google - it is smarter than the echo. I use a respeaker 4 channel array with a raspi.

Biggest con for me was, that both dont provide a way to use your local audio files, cause they want you to buy the same s*** again and again...
Most used function: timers for kitchen and kids

1 Like

No, they listen for a specific keyword - as long as the device does not handle a request, no audio data is sent...

How long can they listen after that keyword? And while they are listening to women being assaulted, they don't do anything, "because of your privacy", great stuff.

I don't want to be monetized over my conversations/phone, you are correct.

As Walter mentions, your mobile phone is almost certainly worse - certainly if you use Android. There is clear evidence that a number of apps are using conversations to drive advertising.

But certainly you should not use either if you are overly concerned about privacy - though I would point out that many security professionals (but certainly not all) are happy to have smart speakers in their homes - but they tend to restrict them to innocuous areas such as the kitchen which is what I also do. The convenience is certainly pretty tremendous.

In terms of which is best - I'm not sure to be honest. I have a Google Home which seems a little more usable for Node-RED but I'm not sure there is anything between them? They also tend to leap-frog each other in terms of capabilities as well.

There is also snips.ai, you need to train it yourself, you can customize it to your own needs and it can output in mqtt and works offline. Watch example.

Interesting. I'd forgotten about them. They seem to have come on a long way since last I looked. Nice find.

Me personally thinks Alexa is easier to integrate into node-red so I would go for that one.

Note, I have both, started off with a home mini and then started using the spot. The google system seems to be more accurate in understanding what I said, but with Alexa I can keep things “local” with using that bridge that I forgot the name of that looks like a Philips Hue that can convert to MQTT so you can add things to turn off/on and dim, etc.. Alexa can discover this where google home doesn’t any more. There’s also other nodes in node-red that seem more advanced than google home stuff.

JFI Newer echos (at least the one I bought last week) can't discover them as devices using node-red-contrib-alexa-local (which I think is the one your referring to)

JFI Newer echos (at least the one I bought last week) can't discover them as devices using node-red-contrib-alexa-local (which I think is the one your referring to)

@cymplecy Simon - did you report that to the author of node-red-contrib-alexa-local?

Author already knows about it

1 Like

It was ha-bridge I was referring to https://github.com/bwssytems/ha-bridge. It's separate from node-red but works quite nicely with it.

Note I couldn't get the docker version working with Alexa on a pi, but running on the host directly does - (I didn't try hard to figure out why tho). node-red-contrib-alexa-local doesn't work with my spot, so I looked at other solutions, there is a few but this one is quite nice.

One other thing that bad about Google is that the may pull a Nest on how you connect up to it now (I use IFTTT). Ofcourse Amazon may do the same, but Google seem to have reputation for it, so not relying on too many companies in the cloud and keeping things as open standard as possible is a good thing.

Looks like it has same issue with being discovered by newer Echos

I can confirm my spot doesn’t have the issue, it does with the node-red local node tho. There is another local option within node red (don’t recall the node name) that you can use that a emulates smartplug make. It only has on/off tho, so no dimming option.