If you are thinking about buying a smart speaker, you might come across these two most popular brands, Google and Amazon’s smart speakers. But well, which is best out of the two and where do I purchase them?....read on to find out more
Knowing their similarities and differences will help you make a more informed purchase. Here are what the two brands of smart speakers can do, and where you can purchase them from.
Google Home Vs Amazon Echo The most pronounced difference between the two speakers is in their digital assistants: 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 and is built right into Google’s overall architecture. 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 that said, both the Google Home and Amazon Echo can perform comparable skills and tasks like telling you the time or turning on music. Both Google Home and Amazon Echo have a range of smart home features such as controlling the thermostat, lights, locking doors etc. Where to get a Google Home or Amazon Echo in Singapore? First things first, Amazon has no retail stores 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 find a sales tax-free US residence address and 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. Please note that when using forwarding services, you are liable to 7% GST if the total cost of the shipment (including shipping charges) exceeds S$400 as you are importing goods into Singapore. 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). If this is too troublesome for you, do consider getting a Google Home instead. There are three 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 offline retailers like Courts, Challenger and Starhub. The regular Google Home is priced at S$189 while the Google Home Mini retails for S$89 with local product support and warranty. Thirdly, buy through online retailers like GeekBite. Why buy from GeekBite? GeekBite is selling Google Home devices at cheaper prices. For Google Home, it retails for S$149, Google Mini S$55, Google Home Hub S$199. All sets comes with free 6 months warranty and a free local adapter for local usage. GeekBite have ready stocks on hand. Once orders are being placed, we ship out your order within next business day and you can expect to receive your Kindle within 3 business days or so. For warranty, GeekBite offers free first 7 days 1-1 exchange and 6 months Google warranty and local support. If there are any warranty claims, contact us and GeekBite will liaise with Google on your behalf for your claims.
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