After several months, if not years, of waiting, they are here. Google, Apple and Amazon have already launched their voice assistants for the home in Spain. Movistar will do it before the end of the year. And Facebook first of the next. The latest to appear, the Amazon Echos, are the best sellers in the world.
It will be difficult to decide. Apple, Google and Amazon have already put their cards on the table in Spain: Home Pod (Apple), Home and mini (Google), and Echo, Echo Plus, Echo Dot, Echo Spot and Echo Sub (Amazon) are already at the sale and we can dialogue with them in Spanish. And before the Christmas lights fill the streets, the Movistar Home will appear, although with very different characteristics and benefits from the previous ones. For those who want to wait, some of the smart home devices from Facebook, Portal and Portal + could arrive in the first quarter of the year, not to mention others from Samsung or Huawei that will appear when their engineers are able to develop them for that they can speak in the language of Cervantes.
It will also be difficult for me to explain and compare the strengths and weaknesses of one and the other, since I have only been able to test and test Google Home and some of the Amazon devices, specifically Echo Plus and Echo Spot. But we have not tasted Apple’s Home Pod, nor Movistar Home, which is not yet on the market at a commercial level and only a group of 5,000 users in the pre-commercial phase enjoy it. And I haven’t had a chance to configure the Echo Dot and Echo Sub either.
We have already written about Google Home, as a result of our experience with it, and about Movistar Home, although we have not tested it, it has also been published in this Blog. So we start with the most recent launch, and with what is undoubtedly the market leader worldwide, Amazon and its Echo devices, and ‘Alexa’, the voice with which the user communicates with all of them. Setting up the Echos is quite simple, although depending on where you have the router it may cost you more or less time. You just have to follow the instructions that the device itself provides. First of all, you will have to connect it to the Wi-Fi network. If you have a large house, and the router is somewhat far from where you connect the Echo Spot, for example, the equipment may not connect to the 5Ghz network, but it sure does connect to the 2.4Ghz network.
Once connected and configured, with Amazon devices you can make calls, although the configuration of the calls is somewhat cumbersome, play music, control the lights and thermostats in the house, that if you have the Amazon Smart Plug, listen to news, make shopping lists and add items at any time just by saying it to Alexa … and a good handful of skills developed in Spanish and that add functionalities such as asking for AVE train times, listening to Cadena SER or the latest sports news from AS or interactive Pocoyo stories, play Trivial Pursuit with the family, order a hamburger, or ask about the status of Iberia flights.
Amazon Echo prices? Echo Dot can now be purchased at Amazon.com for € 59.99; Echo Spot, which integrates a color screen to show news, the weather, compatible digital home cameras, and the possibility of making video calls with other Echo Spots or mobile devices with the Alexa app, costs € 129.99; the Echo Sub, which allows you to add bass and depth to the Echos, is worth € 129.99; and the Amazon Smart Plug, with which you can control lights, fans, compatible coffee makers and other household items, costs € 29.99. Customers who are already Amazon have a special introductory price, with 40% discount on Echo devices: the Echo Dot for € 35.99, the Echo for € 59.99, the Echo Plus for € 89.99 and the Echo Spot for € 77.99.
The Echos are the best-selling voice-controlled speakers in the world. Tens of millions of Echo devices were sold last year alone. Alexa arrives in Spain with new features built and developed from scratch for Spanish customers, including Spanish voice, Spanish support, local knowledge, hundreds of new local Skills, and many of them built by Spanish developers.
How do Amazon Echos work? When the Echo hears the wake-up word, ‘Alexa’, the device’s ring of light turns blue and begins transmitting the request to the cloud, where Alexa processes the information by taking advantage of Amazon’s web services. The voice service, Amazon says, “will get smarter and add more functionality.”
The Amazon Echo and Echo Plus have seven microphones that use noise-canceling and beamforming technology so you can hear clearly from anywhere. This advanced beamforming technology combines signals from individual microphones to suppress noise, music being played, and even the voices of other people in the same room to ensure that Alexa clearly hears any request, even when the user is listening. find yourself in a noisy room.
Echo and Echo Plus have been tuned to deliver clear voices with dynamic bass response. Its 63mm woofer, dedicated tweeter, Dolby processing, and 360 ° omni-directional audio deliver crisp vocals and dynamic bass throughout the room. Echo can stream music directly from services like Amazon Music Unlimited, Prime Music, Spotify Premium, Deezer, and Kiss FM radio, CHAIN 100, Rock FM, and more. Echo is also Bluetooth-enabled, so you can stream music directly from a mobile or tablet.
The new Echo Plus also integrates a Zigbee digital home controller, a temperature sensor, high-quality sound and Wi-Fi settings. The integrated smart home controller makes it easy to set up compatible smart home devices. Simply say “Alexa, discover my devices,” and the Echo Plus will automatically discover and configure them if they are compatible and without the need for any additional drivers or apps.
With Wi-Fi settings, compatible smart devices can be automatically connected to the Echo Plus to the user’s Wi-Fi network, and to Alexa in a few easy steps. All you have to do is turn it on and it will recognize and connect the device to the network using the Wi-Fi password that is stored in the Locker . The Echo Plus also has a 76.2mm neodymium woofer and rear volume so the bass feels strong and the mids and highs are clear.
For next year Amazon leaves, in Spanish, not only its star Echo, the Show, but also the integration of speaker ID so that different voice prints of the different members of the family can be configured and the functionalities of the devices can be customized Threw out. What Amazon has also achieved is the integration of Alexa in Spanish with third-party devices, in brands such as Hama, Harman Kardon, Bose, Jabra, NETGEAR, Energy Sistem, Sono, Jama, SEAT, Huawei, Sony, Riva or Grundig.
The Apple HomePod, which we have not had the opportunity to test or test, is the wireless speaker that works with Siri, now in Spanish since it was launched a few months ago in the United States. With it, Apple says, the user can search for song lyrics, set timers, or make and receive phone calls. It offers high fidelity sound from anywhere in the house, and a stereo pair that provides a more absorbing experience than conventional speakers.
The apple company says that “security and privacy are fundamental parts of the design of Apple hardware, software and services. The HomePod only sends information to its servers after “Hey Siri” is recognized locally on the device using an anonymous and encrypted Siri identifier ”. The price of the Home Pod? 349 euros, the most expensive, and by far, of those sold in Spain.
Google Home and mini were the first smart home assistants to arrive in Spain, and in Spanish. Both devices were launched last June, to bring home almost all the possibilities that smartphones already have to talk with them, navigate, manage music, news, the agenda, … through voice commands. And why do I say almost all of them? Because at the moment it does not allow the making of voice calls or the configuration of the voice print to be able to have several profiles of the different members of a family. Google combines machine learning, voice recognition and integration of the personal context of each user, such as location or daily routines, whenever the user allows it. And you can deliver the most personalized and relevant responses to the customer, or stream video content to a TV connected to a Chromecast device.
We will still have to wait a few weeks to see the operation of Movistar Home live, although as I said at the beginning it is not considered a competition from Amazon’s Echo, Google’s Home and mini or Apple’s Home Pod. The Portal and Portal + of Facebook do seem a robust competitor, since they integrate both screens of 10 and 15 inches of great quality, resolution and format with which communications can be managed from home. They are only available in the United States from this month of November. The 10-inch Portal version is priced at $ 199, and the 15-inch Portal + is priced at $ 349. And until they arrive in Spain, some details of their strengths: Smart camera with Smart Sound technology for video calls; smart sound that minimizes background noise and enhances the speaker’s voice; group calls of up to seven people at the same time; hands-free voice control; Built-in Amazon Alexa; and, among other features, privacy and security control tools.
It is because of all this that we count that there are already analysts who indicate that in 2025 there will be 1.8 billion voice assistants in the home in the world. And Ovum, for its part, says that in 2021 around 623 million digital assistants will be sold in the world both for the home and for other types of environments, such as vehicles, clothing or even televisions.
