Google Home Vs Amazon Echo: Specifications And Features Comparison

Google has launched their smart speaker Home in India. This smart speaker is Google’s answer to Amazon’s Alexa-backed Echo. It was last year’s October when Amazon Echo, along with Echo Dot and Echo Plus debuted in India.

It has been six months since Amazon Echo’s launch in India and with the launch of Google Home, things are going to be spiced up in the Indian smart speaker market.

Both Google Home and Amazon Echo are voice-controlled speakers, Home is backed by Google Assistant and Echo by Amazon’s Alexa.

You can give them certain commands like play music, read the news, set timers and alarms, check the calendar, provide sports scores, control lights at home, and much more.

Priced at Rs 9,999, Google Home is available on Flipkart and 750 other retail stores across India. Amazon Echo is also priced at Rs 9,999 and available through Amazon’s website.

Design

Both Google Home and Amazon Alexa are hands free, voice-controlled speakers which means you can give commands to them just by speaking. Both speakers have microphones with far-field technology which picks your voice from across the room.

Google Home has a touch surface on top which also have LED lights. You can control volume levels and playback by touching the top surface. Also, the lights respond and change pattern according to the command you give. There is only one physical button at the speaker’s back which mutes the Google Assistant.

Google Home comes in white colour with different base colours, by default it ships with slate fabric base.

The smart speaker has a diameter of 96.4mm and 148.2mm of height, its power cable is 1.8 meters long. Talking about the weight, device weighs 477 grams and the power adapter weighs 130 grams.

Amazon Echo on the other hand is a cylindrical speaker with four physical buttons on top for volume, mute and activation. There is a light ring on the top which wakes

It measures 148 x 88 x 88mm and weighs 821 grams, its power cable is 1.8 metres long. Amazon Echo comes in three colours- white, black and grey.

Voice Assistant and Sound

On both speakers, you can play songs, albums or artists from music subscription services like Saavn and TuneIn. Google also plays songs from Play Music and Amazon from Amazon Prime Music.

For news, the both speakers pick feeds from NDTV and Times Of India, Google also gives news from Dainik Bhaskar and Aaj Tak.

You can wake Google Home by saying ‘Hey Google’ or ‘Okay Google’. To connect it with your phone, you’ll have to download Google Home from Play Store. It supports HE-AAC, LC-AAC+, MP3, Vorbis, WAV (LPCM), and FLAC audio formats. Google Home features high-excursion speaker with 2-inch driver and dual 2-inch passive radiators.

You can also enjoy a multi-room experience with Google Home by grouping Chromecast Audio or Chromecast built-in speakers to listen to the same song in every room.

Echo uses on-device software to detect the wake word, “Alexa.” When Echo detects the wake word, the device’s light ring turns blue and begins streaming the request to the cloud where Alexa processes the request.

Amazon Echo features 2.5-inch woofer, dedicated tweeter, Dolby processing, and has 360° omni-directional audio.

Both Home and Echo are also Bluetooth-enabled so you can stream music directly from your phone.

These smart speakers can help you control a lot of devices in your home. You can Control lights, switches and more, using compatible smart devices from brands like Philips Hue and TP-Link.

Connectivity

For connectivity, Google Home has Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth. It supports devices which works with Android 4.4 Kitkat or higher and iOS 9.1.

Amazon Echo supports devices which run on Android 5.0 Lollipop or higher and iOS 9.1 or higher. It also has Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth support.