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Google Home review: A step forward for hotwords, a step backward in capability

A $129 voice appliance should be a pure upgrade over Android voice commands.

Actions and smart home stuff

Besides media, you also have a bevy of voice commands at your disposal to try. You can add items to a shopping list, start up the "I'm feeling lucky" game, ask Google a question, get the weather, or set a timer or alarm. You can even have it call you an Uber once you set up Uber integration.

Of the commands here that are supported, it's surprising that the simpler things like using timers for cooking became my most go-to commands. After telling it "start a timer for x minutes," you can ask "how much time is left on my timer." You can also give your timers names and have multiple concurrent timers. I wish the system was "quiet" about having a timer—it would be nice to use the LEDs on the top as a countdown indicator.

While the audio and hotword will sync across devices, things like the timer or alarms will not. The timer will only beep on whichever device picked up your command. Pretty much all the actions you send to a Google Home will stay on that Google Home, and there's never an interaction with your phone. It would be nice if my smartphone could display active timers, alarms, and other things Google Home is silently doing. The one exception is for playing media. If you dig into the Google Home app, you'll be able to see and control the currently playing music. It would be nice to have this as a notification like normal casting.

If you've got the requisite hardware, there are three smart home platforms supported: Alphabet's Nest, Phillips Hue, and Samsung's SmartThings. Nest is pretty easy; the usual voice commands like "set the temperature to 68 degrees" and "change the mode to [heat/cool/off]" work fine. You can even ask it the temperature "in here" or "of the house," and the Nest-Home tandem will tell you the indoor temperature. The SmartThings integration seems to only be for light switches. Google did not include door locks, presumably so no one can stand outside and yell "OK Google, unlock the door" to break into your house. (This is totally possible on an Echo, by the way.) All your smart home gear gets assigned to "rooms," so if you have multiple lights in a room, you can turn them all off at once. I don't have any Hue stuff, but I assume that works similarly.

If you're more of a "roll your own actions" kind of person, Google just added IFTTT support to the Google Assistant on both the Pixel and the Google Home. IFTTT—that's "If This Then That"—is like a huge "app store" for actions and triggers for all sorts of products and services. You pick a trigger, like say, a new item in an RSS feed, with an action, like tweeting. Then you can combine the two to say "If a new item in this RSS feed shows up, then tweet out a link from this Twitter account"

With the Google Assistant and IFTTT, you can make any spoken phrase trigger any IFTTT action, and you can even pass text or numbers onto the actions. If you're really bummed out about the lack of door lock control, you can add it yourself. I made a phrase "Tell Slack that ....." and whatever followed that command would end up in the Ars Technica Slack channel. Through this avenue, you can post tweets or work a million different smart home devices regardless of whether there is officially sanctioned integration or not.

It's a shame that the Google Assistant can only do IFTTT triggers, though; it would be nice to have some "Do" commands for Google Home, too. That would make the device speak if certain requirements are met. It would be great to be able to push text to the text-to-speech engine and have it read a tweet or RSS feed as they come in, for instance.

User accounts and authentication are a tricky situation for any voice appliance. Google Home supports a single Google account and, after it is set up, has no user authentication—anyone that speaks to Google Home is assumed to be the authorized user. Google works around this with a "Personal Results" checkbox in the Google Home app that turns off access to your personal data. If you turn personal data on, anyone can view your calendar information, call an Uber on your behalf, and... not much else. Solving this in a more elegant fashion is a tricky problem. You'd need some kind of voice-based authentication system. "My voice is my passport, verify me?"

Google Assistant fragmentation

The "Google Assistant" has different capabilities depending on which client you're using. Remembering what works where is a challenge.
The "Google Assistant" has different capabilities depending on which client you're using. Remembering what works where is a challenge.

With the launch of Google Home, the Google Assistant now works in three places. The other two are Google Allo, Google's instant messaging app, and Google Pixel, Google's flagship smartphone. So we've got three clients with the same name and presentation (The Google Assistant) and from a distance it's easy to assume they are all the same system with the same capabilities. But if you actually live with the Assistants, you'll find this is not true. They are three separate systems with three separate feature sets, and that makes living with the Assistant a challenge.

The real downside to Google Home's voice commands is all the stuff that doesn't work. You can see a quick cross section of features in the chart above. Google Home doesn't support creating reminders, sending messages, or creating calendar events. The Google Pixel supports these things, but doesn't support playing Google Play Music playlists or activating the Chromecast. The Assistant in Google Allo has pretty much the complete opposite feature set in our chart, supporting reminders, messages, and events, but not shopping lists, music playlists, or the Chromecast. We've got Google Assistant fragmentation.

You can kind of forgive Allo since it's a different interface—you're typing in an instant messaging client instead of issuing voice commands. Differences between the Pixel and Google Home are completely baffling though. They have identical interfaces—you say "OK Google," issue a voice command, and it responds by voice—but different abilities.

As I mentioned earlier, Google Home and the Google Pixel form a perfect hive mind when it comes to the "OK Google" hotword. You say the phrase and everything lights up, but Google Home takes priority if it is within range. If Google Home isn't in range, the phone will handle the request. Now combine that knowledge with the above chart. You are actually switching feature sets depending on which device decides to pick up.

I have a Google Home on my desk, which both has priority on voice command duty and doesn't support reminders, so I actually can't set reminders by voice anymore. Anytime I try, Google Home is going to pick up and tell me "Sorry, I can't set reminders yet." If I actually want to do this via the hotword, I have to pick up my phone and run to a corner of the house where Google Home won't hear me.

You also lose the ability to use all your phone-specific commands, like toggling Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/Flashlight, navigating to a place, opening apps and websites, making calls, or running "visual" searches for pictures or video. The hotword doesn't intelligently route these phone-specific commands to your phone, so if Google Home can hear you, it takes priority and these commands just stop working.

Command line problems without comprehensive documentation

Having voice commands as a secondary interface on my Google phone was one thing, but paying $129 for a box that only does voice commands is very weird. A voice appliance has no interface, which makes using it a bit of a challenge. After I got setup and working, I looked at my little cylinder and wondered, "Now what"?

Using Google Home is a lot like using a command line. With no real interface to speak of, you have an infinite amount of input possibilities—you can say anything to Google Home, and you can type anything into a command line—but getting anything done relies on knowing what commands will actually do something. If you sit down in front of a command line system you've never seen before, you could blindly enter commands into the terminal and hope to hit on something, but you'll quickly find the command line is only as good as the documentation surrounding it.

Google Home doesn't really have a ton of documentation. If you ask it what it can do, you'll get a two sentence spiel that tells you to look at the Google Home app "for more examples." As promised, the Google Home (and Google Home site) app offers a handful of examples, but there's nothing approaching a comprehensive, full list of commands and parameters that Google Home can handle.

I know instruction manuals are "uncool" for products today. It's one thing to have an intuitive GUI that surfaces every feature on a screen somewhere and lets users stumble around the interface with no instructions, but with absolutely no interface and no way to discover capabilities, Google Home really needs a "Reference Manual" on a similar scale to this 178 page document for Bash. If a command or parameter isn't written down somewhere, you'll just never, ever discover it.

Also like a command line, the syntax for getting something to work is very exact. "Play music in the whole house" doesn't work—the correct command is "Play music on all speakers." "Play my podcast subscriptions" doesn't work, but "Play [podcast name] podcast" does.

A great example was when I spent a half hour unsuccessfully trying to get Google Play Music to play the 1000+ songs I had uploaded to the service. "Play Music" only started the ad-supported radio service, not my uploaded music. "Play my music" didn't work either. I was pretty much out of ideas at this point, and the paltry "examples" in the app weren't any help. "OK Google, what music commands are there?" I asked. "OK, starting music" it replied, promptly blasting the radio again. Next, I opened the Play Music app to see the uploaded music section was called "Music Library." "OK Google, play music from my library?" I asked. Nope—still the radio. At this point I gave up and wrote "can't play uploaded music" in my notes.

The next day during my research, I watched the Google I/O 2016 presentation again, and after the announcement of Google Home they ran a short commercial. The guy walks down the stairs and says "OK Google, play my morning playlist." That was it! That was the magic command I was missing. You can play uploaded music, as long as you do it via a playlist—but not any of the automated playlists like "recent songs" or "thumbs up," only the Playlists you've personally created.

The lack of documentation and exact requirements of the commands means I'm never really sure what Google Home can do. I can't say for sure that there's no way to shuffle your entire music library, I can only say that I personally haven't discovered a command to do that yet. "Play my YouTube subscriptions on the TV" played a video about YouTube subscriptions, so I'm not sure if that works either—I haven't thought of 50 variations of that command yet. The worst thing is that you can't even believe Google Home sometimes. If I say "Play my podcast subscriptions," it says "I'm sorry, I can't play my podcast subscriptions yet." It's easy to interpret that as "podcasts are not supported," but we know that's not the case. A much better thing to say would be "To play podcasts, ask for a podcast by name." That kind of helpful command correction never happens.

So anytime a command fails, a few things run through your head. There's the possibility that this works, but you just didn't get the syntax right. Another possibility is that you did say things correctly, and the Google Home just misheard you. There's also the possibility that the thing you want to do really isn't supported, and you are just banging your head against the wall. And remember Google Home will be silently updated, so the thing you tried last week that didn't work might suddenly work this week. Paying $129 for this thing that you never know how to fully make use of is frustrating.

Someone with a memorized list of commands and syntax in their head will do a better job with Google Home than a newbie. Again, the command line comparison is apt here. Some people are wizards with Bash and can get a lot done, while newbies will stumble around. The lack of documentation is something the Internet will no doubt solve once Google Home is out in the wild, but complete, comprehensive documentation is really something Google should be providing.

Channel Ars Technica