OK GOOGLE…
Home Automation has become a must-have when you think luxury, comfort and convenience inside a home. It enables the ability to connect and control, through a Wi-Fi connected pull, various compatible devices across your home with just your vocalized wish. In my home, we’ve had lightbulbs, outlet switches, thermostats, doorbells, clocks and Smart TV’s connected just to name a few. Google Home and Amazon Alexa are a couple of the most popular such products that offer this service. Though, there is much more opportunity to integrate more devices and also streamline a centralized hub that helps regulate said devices which I believe would really solidify this technology and help drive more adoption. As a tech enthusiast, I must confess I have employed both the Google Home Assistant and the Amazon Alexa.
Rant
I must argue, I am not bias towards one platform over the other, however there is a huge difference in the way we interact with Google Home Assistant versus Amazon Alexa. This is when we first attempt to awaken the assistant by greeting them with their name. For Google Home Assistant, it is a bit of a formal “Hey Google”, or “OK Google”. For Amazon Alexa, it is a simple “Alexa”. In my opinion, that unnecessary and unnatural requirement to use 2 words instead of 1 greatly diminishes the user experience when using GHA over AA. Every time I wish to interact with GHA, I HAVE to use 2 words, whereas with Alexa, I just say “Alexa”, followed by my command, which is a very natural behavior when speaking with others.
To me, while this may have its advantages, it is just bad design. It is unnecessary and thus inefficient. As a user, it requires more input from me, indefinitely as many times as I wish to awaken this device for interaction. While I haven’t heard anyone else complain, it appears as an inconvenience. At a personal level, one critical component to designing my solutions is ensuring the end user has to interact as less as possible to begin their actual journey. For example, when I build websites, I do what ever I possibly can to ensure the end user achieves the highest ROI, in that they get the best, quality content sought out but with the least amount of effort on their part. This may include caching user inputs, or reducing the amount of clicks needed to navigate to a particular page for a faster experience.
Perhaps Google’s intention with this was to reduce false alarms, since whoever in the room says “Hey Google” likely intends to awaken GHA. But maybe they could have simply created a new, unique name to prevent errors and eliminated the need to say “Hey”.
Regardless, this is just my opinion and hopefully serves as some constructive feedback for future updates. OK Google?