Google Home can do all of that too. However, the Echo’s capable of doing a lot more than just that. Here are a number of tasks the Echo can do that Google Home still can’t.
1. Send or Read Text Messages
2. Receive Delivery Notifications
You can even take questions one step further by asking your Echo about the nearest UPS store location, how much time it’ll take for a package to arrive, and even the number of packages you can expect to receive on any particular day in the week.
3. Order and Track Your Pizza
If you have a saved profile with Domino’s Pizza, you can re-order a saved order too. Alexa also hooks up with the Domino’s Tracker, giving you real-time updates regarding the status of your order, including when it’s ready for pickup or out for delivery. It’s worth noting here that while you can order pizza via Google Home, you don’t get this level of comprehensive tracking, reordering, or customization.
4. Whisper to Your Echo
If you hate waking up in the middle of the night and checking your phone, you can simply whisper to your Echo. The Echo microphone is surprisingly intuitive, and picks up on whispers quite quickly. You can whisper to your Echo to tell you the time or turn a light on. Here’s the best part: your Echo recognizes that you’re whispering, and won’t respond back in full volume.
Instead, it whispers back. This is known as Echo’s whisper mode. The tech behind it is fairly intuitive. It uses short-term memory neural networks to detect your speech and then leverages its end-pointing system to analyze silence in the background. If you’re too far, the Echo may simply whisper back, “Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”
6. Customize and Create Your Own Skills
With the Alexa app, you can create your own skills, also known as Blueprints. From custom games to stories, greetings, and specific actions or commands, you can easily create your own skill. This gives you greater control over the different smart home devices that you have in your house.
And, the good thing is that these skills are only stored on your account, so they can’t be shared.
