Amazon Echo vs Google Home - Upgrading my Smart Home

Greetings everyone!

Since its the holiday season I have an opportunity to upgrade my smart home and the biggest addition I'm thinking of adding is voice control vs Amazon Alexa vs Google Home. I'm wondering if anyone can give me some advice on either and any advice on other additions that I may be missing from my current setup. Its mostly lighting / ceiling fan control via insteon switches and we can control the garage door via an I/O Hub.

Here is our current setup:
SwitchLinc Relay - INSTEON 2476S X 2
SwitchLinc Dimmer - INSTEON 2476D X 2
SwitchLinc Dimmer - INSTEON 2477D X 6
Venstar ACC0410 Add-A-Wire Accessory for Programmable Digital Thermostats w/ Thermostat Adapter (2441V)
Venstar Indoor/Outdoor Remote Temperature Sensor
INSTEON 74551 Garage Door Control & Status Kit

****CURRENTLY NOT IN USE****
INSTEON 2342-222 Mini Remote - 8 Scene
INSTEON 75790 Wireless Security IP Camera with Pan, Tilt and Night Vision
INSTEON 2842-222 Wireless Motion Sensor
FanLinc - INSTEON 2475F Ceiling Fan and Light Controller, Fixture Module (Dual-Band)
INSTEON 2472DWH OutletLinc Dimmer - Remote Control Outlet (Dual Band), White

I’m currently running Indigo 6 on an old Mac Pro 2008 (first gen) that won’t upgrade past 10.7. We are an entirely apple ecosysytem (2 iPhone 6’s, Apple TV fourth gen, MacBook Pro Early 2011 and an iPad mini 2). Our entertainment pretty much consists of the Apple TV connected to a Panasonic 42” Plasma thats about 10 yrs old and an Onkyo TX-NR626 Receiver (so we can control the surround sound volume via our iPhones).

Since we have been pretty one sided with Apple and Insteon, what are we missing out on or what are some cool things we could add to the automation? I was thinking at least an Amazon Echo Dot or Google Home (leaning towards Amazon) and a hub that would allow us to break free from having to have a server running on a computer.

So here are my list of thoughts / ideas:
1. Amazon Echo Dot or Google Home to add voice control and other “assistant” options
2. Hub (primarily for use with above but also to no depend on the server running on an old Mac Pro)
3. Control for Roman Shades in the living room
4. Door bell / video surveillance - I’d really like to be able to know when someone is at the front door and see them. It’d be nice when someone rings the doorbell to get an alert that pops up with a video feed from the front door to see if I really need to get up and answer the door or not. The ability to silence the door bell vs an audible alarm would be a plus.
5. Door Lock Control would be a nice feature.

I know there are other things I’m missing out on. Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions?

Thanks everyone!

I've recently begun integration Alexa into my home control stuff by utilizing the Alexa Bridge Plug-in. Suggest you give this a try by starting with an Amazon Dot (currently on sale for $39.95) just to see how this works for you.

I've enjoyed adding the voice control to a lot of things in the house. My wife sometimes even finds it useful.

I'd sell my collection of echos in a heartbeat if the google hime integrated with indigo like the echos do. It's my understanding that they don't integrate right now however.


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The week the Google Home came out, I purchased one alongside a Echo to see which path I wanted to go down. While the Echo wins hands down with current home automation integrations... it is the one heading back to Amazon....

Today I have Google Home controlling all of my Indigo 7 devices by way of HA Bridge (https://github.com/bwssytems/ha-bridge). While it takes a bit longer to set up, you just control everything through the Rest API, it works perfect.

Two things made me keep the Google Home...

1. You can seriously ask the Home ANYTHING and it often has an answer. "How many ounces of milk should a 1 year old drink a day?" and it answers. The ability to answer real questions that you'd normally take out a smart phone to do a quick search on completely sold my wife on the Google Home. Lets face it... 90% of all of our home automation decision making is driven by SO approval (or we just add and don't give them control ). The Echo has nothing on the Home in this way and unless Bing steps up their game on search, I don't see the Amazon/Echo being able to handle this type of query on large scale any time soon.

2. I hate interacting with voice applications via keywords. Everything on the Echo (outside of core home automation) is "Tell x to y". It doesn't feel natural and I hate having to really script what you want to say. The Google Home developer API isn't live yet, but Google has already stated they don't want anything to rely on saying keywords for context. I hope the API is as good as they say it will be... but only time will tell.


I'm hoping that once the Google Home API is live one of our very talented plugin developers will be all over it. Even if the API is not everything I want it to be... I suspect a few modifications could be made to the Alexa-Hue-Bridge plugin to work well with the Google Home (HA Bridge is just another Hue emulator after all).

I am definitely waiting anxiously for the Actions on Google API. One of the examples of "Direct Actions" specifically calls out Home Automation use in terms of custom actions -- which makes me pretty darn hopeful. I decided not to fight the Port 80 thing until I see that and determine what is possible via the API...

I'm curious why you're apparently intent on going the Alexa rather than the Siri route, given that you're an Apple house.

Homebridge works pretty well for me as a voice interface to Indigo. Especially handy if you have Apple Watches.

[jay (support)]

I don't always have a Siri capable device near me, nor do my guests. But with an Echo sitting in the kitchen it doesn't matter. That's it for me, at least.

I tried a workaround a while back for using Siri but it didn't work too well. For one the need to hit/hold the home button to access Siri is a turn off. We would typically just use the indigo app on our phone at that point. So reasons similar to jay. Also the workaround required having to run a terminal command every time the system reset which led to just leaving it after a while. Wish I knew if that was homebridge or not.


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The problem with all the voice recognition technologies is that they are cloud based; if the satellite link at my house goes down (which is common in really rough weather when we most need it to track incoming storms), Siri seems to be able to fall back to 4G, sometimes at least... Until Alexa and/or Google come up with aworkaround for that I'm not certain how useful they will be for me.

OK I updated my home bridge and I must admit being able to control my home automation with my Siri remote for the AppleTV is pretty cool. Having said that though, it still sucks having to use the device names which can be long (living room ceiling fan lights vs bedroom ceiling fan lights vs fireplace light for example). That and the search functions of Siri returning a web page vs just an answer kinda suck


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I am definitely waiting anxiously for the Actions on Google API. One of the examples of "Direct Actions" specifically calls out Home Automation use in terms of custom actions -- which makes me pretty darn hopeful. I decided not to fight the Port 80 thing until I see that and determine what is possible via the API...

https://developers.google.com/actions/

Yeah, I looked it at whenever they published the additional information to developers a while back. There are a couple of promising looking features including a very nice conversation flow that you can implement; however, like Amazon, they have chosen to restrict authentication to OAuth tokens. When/if Matt and Jay get around to implementing an OAuth server to accommodate the Echo, I imagine we can integrate into that using the same service for Google Home.

The conversations that Home will allow are VERY impressive -- the user is allowed to request / ask for things in a very flexible manner, more flexible than Alexa allows. And the code isn't that bad to write either (I've played around with their published examples and tutorials).

They also have "Direct Actions" to integrate with HA, but it appears it would still have to go through the reflector because it will require some form of OAuth from what I can tell anyway. Those details are not yet available.

[jay (support)]

Here's a HUGE strike against Google Home IMO...

Using it for advertising is the next obvious step, and Google are the first to trial this service.

Here. Let me fix that for you.

Using it for advertising is the next dubious step, and Google are the first to trial this service.

Here is Google's response on the subject:

This wasn’t intended to be an ad. What’s circulating online was a part of our My Day feature, where after providing helpful information about your day, we sometimes call out timely content. We’re continuing to experiment with new ways to surface unique content for users and we could have done better in this case.

I didn't experience this, but their response is not exactly that comforting -- semantics aside, it still amounted to an advertisement if it were played for My Day when you didn't have some type of Entertainment News selected. Very poor judgement by someone(s).

Having lived with both side-by-side for several months now, I can say that Google Home is heads and tails more accurate at voice recognition and response accuracy than Alexa. However, despite many good improvements, Home still lags behind Alexa in terms of overall capabilities. One interesting feature that I haven't tried is that Home now can control your smart devices out of network via the Assistant on your phone; taking on Home Kit at least in terms of device control.

Overall, I really don't use either except for the very basic of things. I should try more, but I just feel weird talking to my house when others are around... nobody else feel this way?