Google Home vs Amazon Echo: The Smart Home Speaker Showdown

15/4/2019

It's the showdown between the Behemoths, a definite must read for those of you who're jumping on board with the hype of Internet Of Things and the revolution of smart homes. We'd got quite the insights on this battle showdown here between these two titans. Check out who's the real winner! You're in for for a treat ? .....

Two well-known smart speakers vying to be the voice assistant to dominate our homes has well and truly begun. While the Amazon Echo took an early lead by being released first, Google has upped its game for its Home range of speakers, notably the additional of Google Hub this year.
The Amazon Echo features the Alexa digital assistant, while the Google Home features the Google Assistant.
Alexa can understand simple commands, or even a series of commands. However, Alexa requires you to phrase things in a particular way for her to understand you, and the language you have to use is not always natural. It also uses Bing as it’s default search engine, which may not always give you the best search results.
In comparison, Google Assistant has the distinct advantage of its’ own Google search engine. As such, Google Assistant have a wealth of information.
Google Assistant also enables two-way conversation between user and assistant, which is based on Google’s own language processing algorithm. As compared to Alexa, Google Assistant has a much more natural conversation flow due to its’ context-aware ability.
For instant, you may ask “How’s the weather today?” to get a weather forecast. Afterwards, you can follow up with, “And tomorrow”, and Google will know it is a follow up with the previous topic.
You can ask Google Home devices for directions or traffic reports, with the results directly pulled from Google Maps. In comparison, Echo can only give you traffic information to one address that you enter into the Alexa app.
With this knowledge, you might consider getting a smart speaker for your home. But where can you buy both from here in Singapore?

How to get Amazon Echo or Google Home In Singapore?
First things first, Amazon Echo is not yet released in Singapore, the only way to buy an Amazon Echo is to get it from Amazon USA directly and ship it to Singapore using a forwarder.
By purchasing on Amazon, you will have to incur additional 3% credit card charge and processing fee for forex conversion. Assuming you have no friends and family in the US, it is also complicated and troublesome to arrange shipment back to Singapore. Additionally, unless you are patient enough, this method is slow, and will take a long time (~2 weeks) to reach you.
The biggest disadvantage with this method is the lack of local support, local features (Numerous features on Echo only available in USA) and warranty. As with any electronic devices, it is prone to any faults or malfunction. You will have to contact Amazon USA directly for support. If there are any warranty claims, it will be at your own cost to return the Kindle back to Amazon USA for repair (shipping fees for both ways).
With all this in mind, naturally the Google Home is a better choice here.
There are two ways to get a Google Home device in Singapore. First, is to get the device directly from Google Singapore via store.google.com/sg. Secondly, buy through several online and offline retailers like Courts, Challenger, Starhub etc. The Google Home is priced at S$189 while the Google Home Mini retails for S$79 with local product support and warranty.

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