Google Home review: In catch-up to Echo, but with promise

Ask Google Assistant inside Google Home what it thinks of Amazon Echo's Alexa and you get a gracious reply: “I like Alexa’s blue lights. Her voice is nice too.”

(Alexa offers no opinion of the Google Assistant.)

Civility aside, the standalone $129 Home speaker that becomes available Friday is Google’s answer to the $179.99 Echo speaker, and a potentially strong answer at that, though Google is still in catchup mode and too often answered my voice queries with a “sorry I don’t know how to help with that yet.”

Echo was better at answering questions on who was expected to win the presidential election and who won the World Series and guessing a song you're looking for. Google Home had the edge with some features, like "tell me about my day."

Still, the competition between the two cloud-based, artificial intelligence-infused, voice-activated digital assistants is only likely to heat up—and promises to get even better.

Gartner recently projected that the global market for wireless speakers enabled by personal assistants will reach $2.1 billion by 2020, up from $360 million last year.

OK, Google

You summon the Google Assistant on Google Home, with a familiar “OK Google” verbal command, since the only physical button on Home mutes the microphone. Google Home stands roughly half as tall as the cylindrical-shaped Echo and you can change its aesthetic by replacing its base with one of a different color or texture. Indeed, Google Home is meant to be shown off in the home. It slopes down at the top, where you’ll find a capacitive touch surface and hidden LED lights that come alive when you issue a verbal command or Home is responding to your request. This is similar to the lights that ring the top of Echo.

You can slide your finger on this touch surface to change the volume on Home, but as with Echo it is much easier to do so via voice (e.g. “OK Google, set volume to 50%.”)

Home and Echo each exploit far-field voice recognition microphones, and way more times than not both recognized what I had to say, even with background noise and even if I was on the other side of the room.