I’m just curious what people’s experiences are with these varying services? I’d imagine they are soon going to be vastly upgraded or replaced by improvements in natural language AI in the coming years, but for the time being which one do you use and what are the pros and cons of each in the different languages and applications you use with them? Any useful tips specifically for Japan or for using them in bilingual households or language learning aspects?
I know none of them are great from an information privacy perspective and ideally I’d love to ditch them all and set up my own internal closed system voice command network, but it requires a lot of time and research to get into something like that and I’ve only just begun looking into how to set something like that up. Most solutions right now are very much work in progress and many that I’ve looked at so far do not have a Japanese language database set up yet.
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Hey Google, who’s the best, you, Alexa, Siri, or someone else?
And Google Assistant has Japanese support, but, your phone has to be in Japanese language mode or it will try to translate everything into English characters/words. Sometimes with hilarious results!
They all suck, no matter what language.
I have an Echo Show and a Google Nest Hub for my room. Alexa sucks and Google has gotten progressively worse. Alexa can’t show me my cameras anymore, Google can, but getting it to show me the right one is nearly impossible. Google also refuses to use my YouTube account for anything, instead showing me my kid’s account.
Google Assistant, which is also built into my TV cannot turn itself off anymore. It recognizes the command and just crashes.
Siri isn’t an assistant, it’s just voice control that needs an internet connection to function.
I went all in on Alexa and the experience has improved over the years.
* Multi-room audio is great. I have 3 speakers and you can play music through your whole house no problem.
* It’s bilingual now so you can use Japanese and English.
* The smart-home integrations are pretty smooth. I use IR blasters and smart plugs to control other devices.
The bad stuff:
* Messing around with Japanese amazon accounts and US amazon accounts can be annoying.
* Alexa is starting to push more ads. “Hey, do you want to buy a premium alarm clock tone!”
* It’s not a fully local solution
If it’s for home automation, I would take a serious look at HomeAssistant.
Sadly all bad lol. For tv and music I use hey sonos. For call Amazon. And weather others google. Barely use siri
Alexa all the way (the rest sucked); I can’t wait for a ChatGPT speaker
Whenever I read an article about AI destroying humanity, I think about how dumb Siri is.
Alexa seems to be the best of them in a bilingual setup but… it’s not a great accolade, it just sucks less than the alternatives. The big plus side is that you can set Alexa to recognise both English and Japanese, and she’ll figure out which one you’re speaking on the fly. Multi room audio is also nice (when it works), and Amazon Japan integration is a bonus.
The downsides are frustrating as hell though. Amazon can’t really do consumer software to save their lives; having to mess about with stuff like Amazon Photos (to use an Echo Show as a photo frame), the phone Alexa app, or the whole disastrous “skills” ecosystem is pure pain. I bought a Ring doorbell / camera a while back and discovered I couldn’t use the skill for it without switching my Alexa over to Amazon.com, which would prevent it working with my Amazon Japan stuff; other skills straight-up won’t work with English voice commands because I’m running the Amazon Japan version. All of this undermines the bilingual functionality pretty badly.
Every few weeks a silent software update will break something new; the latest quirk in my setup is that Alexa has started reading about half of the Japanese announcements and responses in her English voice, i.e., enunciating every Japanese syllable in an American accent like a fresh off the boat JET trying to order in McDonalds.
If you’ve got multiple Echo devices, they’re also terrible at figuring out which to respond to you from – I’ll often speak to one in the kitchen and hear a muffled response from the one in the bedroom for no clear reason. Both Apple and Google’s smart devices have figured this out quite nicely, idk why Amazon’s are so confused by it.
For all this, I’d say Alexa is still the best option for a smart home setup – but depending how things go in the next year or so, that could change very easily. Honestly, given the pace of advances in natural language interfaces, I probably wouldn’t invest in one ecosystem or another until I saw how things shook out in the coming year.
I got some free Google minis by buying various electronic equipment, so I set them up in my place even though I am an apple person.
I have a YouTube premium account which also includes YouTube music, so that’s connected to the speakers.
I also added my hue light system and my Roomba vacuum, my Xbox and my TV. I can use English or Japanese to control all of the above.
I don’t have any apple home device, but I use Siri on my phone or Mac to control the lights as well or ask general questions.
I shop most of our stuffs on Amazon, so using Alexa was easy because they let you know which devices are compatible with Alexa and which are not. We have switch bots to turn on/off stuffs also, so for now I’m pleased with its performance.
I think Siri is the worst choice (and I really like Apple products in general) because of its lack of support for multiple languages at once.
Alexa and Google are both OK, if you speak only English and Japanese. If you speak an additional language, Google is better.
NONE. I don’t see how anything voice activated could be easier. It’s not like everything can be linked to them anyway. People really love to spend money on the most superfluous “improvements”.