I love new gadgets and I have high hopes for voice interfaces in the future. So, I’ve been trying a Google Home and two Amazon Echo Dots along with Siri on my iPhone. I’ve had most of these devices for a while now, but figured I would share my experiences.

All of the devices are pretty good at understanding my requests — or at least at interpreting the words I say to them. I fully expected Google to have the best natural language processing capabilities, and that is by and large true. However, it’s often also meaningless. Most of what I ask for is either the weather, a timer, or to turn on/off lights. Siri can’t handle my lights yet (HomeKit support is a bit of mess with devices right now) but is great for sending texts.

The big surprise has been Google’s poor support for actions! For some reason I can connect any Calendar in my Google account to Amazon for Alexa to be able to read my schedule. But Google will only use the primary calendar for my Gmail account. Google’s lack of real support for users who have Gmail and GSuite is a ridiculous oversight — especially compared to what Amazon is doing. It’s honestly embarrassing.

Third party integrations is another example. Alexa can now turn on music through my Sonos system at home. It’s actually pretty impressive to be able to ask Alexa to turn on a Spotify playlist on a specific Sonos speaker and have it just work. While Google has nice support for IFTTT to create custom commands, it doesn’t (yet) have Sonos integration. That sort of smooth, custom-built integration will always beat a roll your own solution.

Overall, while I expected to see Google Home be the most functional device, I mostly use Alexa. Poor Google Home has been relegated to a drawer at this time until it can’t at least read my calendar to me…