After being unimpressed with the Echo/Echo Dot, I've not really looked into Google Home. The recent price drop on the Mini got me interested though and with the Max around the corner and capability tweaks/development, is now the time to buy? Anyone with any experience care to share?
If you were unimpressed by the Echo, chances are you'll be equally non-plussed with the Google effort.
It still needs a lot of work, but new features seem to be added on a regular basis. I find it really useful for general reminders (garbage day), as a timer in the kitchen and best of all, having the verbal equivalent of lmgtfy. I managed to pick up 2 home mini's for $US 30 a piece on black Friday, which should be enough to cover most of my house now (In addition to the full size one I've had for ~6 months now). As to if you should buy one - grab a mini and see if you like it (or wait for a max if you want more of a Sonos experience). The more people that buy them and use them, the better the system will get.
What are you looking for? Smart-home integration or more of a digital assistant experience? Whilst I've not used Google Home in anger, I periodically conduct a bit of research on its smart home prowess and have so far ended up concluding that I'll stick with Echo for now, for home-smartness. I get the impression that Google home is a better digital assistant, but have never checked it out in depth, as that's not really what I use echo for.
I don't really see the reason for having a Google home device, does it do anything different to what I can do with my smart phone? I talk to Google all the time on my phone which is always in my pocket
Actually going out and spending my hard earned cash on a Hal 9000 just creeps me out, its bad enough my phone is always listening. "If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself" - George Orwell, 1984 Oh and the funniest bit is, if governments turned around and said they were putting small round devices within homes that are always listening the public backlash would have been immense, however slap a price tag on it and ask big corporations to flog the tech the people queue up for them. All this whilst there have been some of the biggest data breaches in our online history. On the flip side, the Chinese and Russians can go ahead and analysis the statistic's related to our shopping lists we ask google to create.
Exactly what I tell people but just reading it them freaked me out........ People think they're getting Star Trek but they are getting Big Brother
So, the general consensus seems to be the privacy risk outweighs the usefulness - which I can totally appreciate. That being said, what's the risk difference between this and your smartphone with the same feature then?
Why not get a RPi3 & Google AIY Voice Kit? It's roughly the same price but if Assistant sucks you still have a Raspberry Pi to do other things with, plus you can return to the voice HAT periodically to see how the software has matured.
Nothing really. Anything that has a mic or a camera in your house can potentially be used to spy on you. I'm not personally worried about anything said in my house, but if I was plotting with a group of friends to send the government a strongly worded letter about tax hikes, the google device would obviously get unplugged during the meeting. All that being said, I'm gonna keep a damn close eye on the thing. If the courts decide that always on wiretaps can be applied to them or the NSA develops a warrantless wiretap tool (and has it stolen), I'd probably bin 'em.
I paid ~175 $CDN for my regular google home and figured there was a fair bit of reserve for future development and data center costs in that price. The 29 $USD I paid for the new mini's I bought recently has now caused me some doubt about how google is funding this going forward. Alexa can order stuff from her favourite store and make money that way, but I haven't seen(haven't looked that hard tbh) anything from google yet.
I'm of the same opinion. I was trying to elicit a response from anti-smart device members who quite happily use a smartphone, complete with identical privacy risks. I'd be genuinely interested to know what phones Ramble and Goldstar use, given their take on smart home devices. (Honest question too, not being facetious).
I'm of the other ilk. I don't have any significant privacy concerns. In a digital world, we're going to have some level of digital footprint, whether we like it or not. It's all about managing the risk. Your way is to minimise your digital exposure completely and I applaud you for that; however, for me, the convenience vs. the risk is what I balance when I make these choices. Not ideal, I know but such is life these days.
