The Best Smart Home Assistant is … All of Them
Choosing a smart home digital assistant seems to be rather misunderstood at the moment. Most important feature it should have is voice recognition for commands that allow you to utter words which it can interpret into actions. I don’t think you should focus your attention on one, since they all have their limitations. For example if you use an assistant on your home computer, you can’t take it with you when you drive in your car. You need another form factor on a device that can run an assistant. I would rather encourage using each one for their best features. You can use one where you can’t use the other and I have narrowed it down to the top 4 familiar names — Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, Google Assistant and Apple Siri.
You might hear tech evangelists preach about their favorite assistant without telling the part that they are getting paid or sponsored to talk about them. By narrowing your choice to one, you are missing out on the features the others have to offer. Assistants also work in different configurations depending on the environment, form factor and type of device you must remember. If you really need to choose just one at the moment, you may realize you can actually use two or more. I found it best to use multiple assistants because I work in a mixed environment of Mac, Windows, Android and iOS. I also use devices with different form factors. What’s important is that the assistant can perform the basic tasks of answering questions, finding information, performing tasks and controlling devices. The top 4 I have used also incorporate AI into their assistants to give it more intelligence when interacting with users.
When it comes to environment, you can run an assistant either standalone or an app. If you want a standalone assistant Alexa would be a good choice. Alexa comes with the Amazon Echo device. It is an actual device that you can place anywhere and you can have many of them around your house, forming a part of an ecosystem that Amazon is still defining. It is a type of speaker assistant which requires an app that is supported on various mobile devices, including the Fire OS. All it needs is a WiFi connection and the app to setup the device from your smartphone. Alexa is very straightforward. Since it is a speaker it can play music for you as well from streaming services. Echo also has a bluetooth interface which can connect to external dspeakers to play music. Alexa has many other capabilities called “skills” that allow it to interface with smart homes, order food, call for services, play streaming video and organize schedules (among the many). You can also be far away from Echo and it can still hear you since it has multiple microphone arrays. Of all the assistants I review, Alexa is the only one without a command line interface.
On the desktop level, most have PCs running Windows 10 (most up to date). This is where to use Cortana since it is right there on Windows. All the PC needs is a microphone for you to talk to Cortana and an Internet connection that allows Cortana to deliver the information using Bing. Cortana also has access to Microsoft’s Azure cloud for more specific applications that work with Office that has an injection of AI. Cortana works much like a tool as well to help you around the desktop and even help organize your schedule like a real assistant. On PC notebooks, laptops and tablet devices running Windows, Cortana is the best choice.
The most popular search engine company, Google, has what it simply calls Google Assistant. It’s like putting a talking version of Google’s search engine and more. This works with Android based smartphones, the Google Home smart speaker and Android Ware (watches, etc.). Many smartphone brands use Android so this has become the default assistant installed. The app integrates well with the home function button. When pressed a user merely speaks and Google Assistant will reply back and display the information. Besides being a knowledge bank, Google Assistant can also call a person from your contact list, order pizza from online delivery service and remind you of what’s on your calendar. A standalone device called Google Home can also run Google Assistant much like Alexa on Echo.
The earliest successful smart assistant is Siri, and it has evolved on #iOS devices. The good thing about Siri is that it now has a #macOS version as well. iPhone users have gotten use to Siri helping them with calendar, e-mail and opening apps. Now Siri has the capability to also control smart home devices specified by Apple. Also great about Siri is this runs on a variety of devices from an iPhone to an iPad and now even a MacBook Pro or iMac. Apple’s OS upgrades were necessary to bring Siri to it’s other devices, besides mobiles. Like Cortana, it can run on desktop and laptop computers, but requires using Apple’s macOS. This versatility makes Siri available across Apple’s ecosystem.
So if you work on a Mac use Siri. If you use an Android smartphone, Google Assistant. Working on a PC desktop with Windows, use Cortana. If you neither of the three interest you or does not apply to you, just go get a standalone speaker assistant like Alexa. You will probably still need to use another assistant though since you can’t really bring an Echo to the beach with you, so that is why there are assistants available on smartphones and tablet devices as well. Soon some of these assistants may go cross or multi-platform as well. They all have one thing in common … to make your life simpler and more manageable. In the end it is preference based on requirement that will determine the best choice.
