Smart Home 2017 The Year Of The Voice

Amazon Echo and Google Home Are at the Forefront of the Smart Home Revolution. Here's What They Are, What They Do and How to Use Them to Control Your Connected Pad.

- Rob Carney, Jon Porter & Nick Pino

We can’t wait to have robot butlers. Sure, this might lead to a very small chance of a robot revolution and the destruction of humanity as we know it, but it’s a small price to pay for the possibility of one day having a lovely cup of coffee brought to you while you lay in bed on a Sunday morning. We might not quite be at the point where robots hand-deliver food items, but thanks to Amazon and Google’s work on artificial intelligence we’re moving ever closer to that delightfully lazy future.

First up there’s Amazon Echo (£150), a small, cylindrical speaker with a built-in microphone and an artificial intelligence named Alexa, who responds to your voice commands, giving you the music you love, news bulletins, access to your calendar, and who’ll even order you a takeaway. Just say ‘Alexa…’ followed by your command. The Echo, whilst available in the US for over a year now, has only just made it onto UK shores.

Then there’s the $129 Google Home (triggered by ‘OK Google’), being a small speaker that enables you to control a number of integrated apps and services, as well as accessing Google’s own search results and formidable suite of services. It’s not available in the UK yet, but we imported one, and for the most part it works fine in the UK. So let’s look at both of them – what they do and, ultimately, which is right for you.