#amazon

Amazon Echo (Alexa) vs Google Home (Assistant)

https://beau.blog/2017/01/amazon-echo-alexa-vs-google-home-assistant/

I have both of these devices at home, and have had them each for a few months (at least now). I got the Amazon Echo first, so have had it for a lot longer. I grabbed a Google Home because they were on sale and I wanted to compare the 2 systems. Here’s an outline of my experience thus far.

Amazon Echo/Alexa

  • Far superior audio quality. The speaker blows the Google Home away.
  • Microphones/initial detection seem to be better, so you can yell from another room, from around a corner, etc, and Alexa will respond.
  • Earlier to the game with a developer program, so there are a lot of “skills” available, although a lot (most?) of them are pretty useless trivia type games.
  • Smart Home integration is much better so far. Includes an “internal” concept of devices, so you can create groups of devices natively within the Alexa app, and use them in commands, even if they’re different device types. For example I can group a LIFX light bulb, and a light that’s controlled through Wink, and have it all controlled as a single group via Alexa.
  • Wink hub integration is nice, and I centralize as much as possible through there.
  • Developing for Alexa is kind of cool. I built a few test skills using Lambda hosting, and was able to interact with Car2Go and WordPress.com pretty easily.
  • Radio integration (via TuneIn) is pretty nice, and being able to just “play triple j radio” (Australian station) is awesome.
  • I use Spotify for all my music, and it gets a little tedious having to say “on Spotify” for everything (because Alexa will default to Amazon Prime music otherwise).
  • It feels like total magic to walk into my house with music streaming from Spotify to headphones (via my phone), and then say “Alexa, play from Spotify” and it’ll just take over mid-track and keep playing.

Google Home/Assistant

  • Linking it up with a Chromecast allows for some really nice integrations.
  • No Wink integration yet leaves me pretty sad. It means that basically none of the home automation stuff that I have is accessible directly through the Home. I have to set things up as a shortcut in Wink, then as an IFTTT trigger against that shortcut. Pretty annoying.
  • I turned to IFTTT pretty quickly to do any of the interesting home automation stuff I wanted to play with, because of the lack of Wink integration. It works reasonably well, but is a little slower than I’d like since it has to get to Google, IFTTT, then (in my case), Wink, and finally control something in my house.
  • Integrations are only available for Nest (thermostat only), Philips Hue and SmartThings on the home automation front.
  • I like the lights/interaction with the Google Home a bit more. The colored dots/animations feel “friendlier”.
  • The touch-sensitive top of the Home is a nice addition. I have mine on my desk and find myself just tapping it quickly to pause, and sometimes using the spiral/swipe to adjust volume (although that’s a kind of awkward interaction).
  • I haven’t built anything on it yet, but Google’s API.ai looks really interesting, and provides a pretty nice interface (and learning system) compared to having to write/generate a ton of utterances with Alexa.
  • I don’t find the microphones/initial detection particularly good. I prefer to say “Hey Google” than “OK Google”, but either way I often find myself repeating it a few times to “get its attention”, and I also seem to see more “false-triggers” on the Google Home than I do on the Echo.
  • The app prompts me to download separate apps, which I guess provide some level of integration? I tried downloading the TuneIn one, but couldn’t play JJJ radio because it “could not be found”.
  • Setting Spotify as my default music source is nice, so now if I just ask for a track/artist, it always uses Spotify. I do find that often the first attempt to play music from Spotify doesn’t work though. Assistant will say “ok, playing from Spotify…” then just go quiet. If I repeat myself, it’ll work the next time. I have a feeling it’s related to the way Spotify handles multiple devices on the same account though, which seems to be a little bit funky with the Google Home in particular.
  • Google seems generally better at answering “random” questions, and seems to come up with something for a lot more queries than Alexa.
  • The set up process for the Home + Chromecast was a bit nicer than for the Echo.

h/t to Luca’s post that inspired me to write up my own experiences.

Amazon Introduces S3 Versioning

Today, Amazon Web Services introduced beta access to a versioning system across all S3 regions in their cloud. This means that you can now save additional copies of an object within S3, while retaining older copies behind the scenes. You can read the developer documentation about this new functionality in amongst the other Amazon Simple Storage Service docs.

I’ll be interested to see how long it takes for someone to build a Time Machine-style backup service using this new core functionality; retaining all revisions of all files stored within that volume. People are going to have to be a little careful about how much they store with this new model, because I imagine it will be very easy to start adding up a lot of space when storing duplicates of objects over time. It seems as if AWS stores full copies of objects (not partial differences between versions), so storage space should be easier to calculate/account for at least.

Versioning is enabled on a per-bucket basis, and you may also optionally require multi-factor authentication with a hardware device to delete versioned objects. The new functionality introduces a versionid concept for each object within a versioning-enabled bucket which keeps track of specific versions of an object, while a normal GET request will get the most recent version available.

It’s great to see Amazon continue innovating and listening to their customers. They are definitely not the only players in the cloud storage/computing game, but they seem to be doing a pretty good job at staying ahead of the curve.

KRead: a simple feed reader for the Kindle 2

It’s Saturday, and I just got a Kindle 2 this week. I’ve been thinking it’d be neat to be able to read feeds on the Kindle (since it has a built in Web Browser and internet connection), so I whipped up KRead. It’s a super-simple, mostly-text-only feed reader for the Kindle which just requires you to enter the URL of a single feed (or a website, it supports auto-discovery) and it’ll give you the content of the feed in a simply-formatted list so that you can read through it.

Check out the KRead project page for some more details or jump over to http://kread.beaulebens.com/ and try it out.

Idea: Amazon Music Exploration Application

Music is important to me. Not because I have any musical talent (at all), or because I work in the music industry (or ever have) or even have friends who are musicians (although I do have a couple). Music is important to me because I listen to it almost every waking hour, and need it to concentrate while I’m working.

According to iTunes, I have just under 6,000 “items” in my music library. That’s 16.5 days of music, playing 24/7. I like to find new music, and have pretty eclectic musical tastes (literally everything from The Corrs to korn appears in my library). I’d like a tool that helps me do a few things: (more…)

Amazon’s Start-Up Event Tour 2008: San Francisco

Amazon held another event focused on educating start-ups and existing tech companies about their web services offerings and how to integrate them into they current (or new) businesses. I attended a similar event previously at Mezzanine in SF, but this time around we’re in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel (near Union Square).

So far I would estimate around 90 – 95% males, and perhaps even a higher than SF-usual ratio of about 90% Mac laptops in use. (more…)