I waited years for Google's answer to Alexa—here's why it still falls short

Published Jul 22, 2026, 8:45 AM EDT Aggy is a veteran writer and editor in the technology and gaming space. Having served as a Managing Editor for high-traffic digital publications, alongside being an editor and consultant for over a dozen sites. Aggy's published work spans a wide and respected array of tech and gaming outlets, including WePC, Screen Rant, How-To Geek, Android Police, PC Invasion, and Try Hard Guides. Beyond editorial work, Aggy's direct experience in the tech sphere extends to app development. Aggy has published two games under Tales and is always eager to learn and do more. He also likes working on computers and researching in his spare time. He knows about Windows, Linux, Audio, Video, and much more. Smart home assistants were supposed to get better over time. More natural, more reliable, better integrated with everything else you already use. Google had every reason to lead that charge. It built an unstoppable search engine, it already lived inside your phone, and its early hardware genuinely felt ahead of what Amazon was doing. I held onto that optimism longer than most. However, in my opinion, Amazon still has Google beat. Google had a great start with smart homes The original Google Home was better than Alexa When Amazon launched the Echo, even I wrote it off as a gimmick that invades privacy. That first thought changed pretty quickly. Alexa has grown and evolved to have so many skills and ways of operating. Amazon locked in a massive head start, and it would be hard to find a serious competitor within the first few years. Google saw where things were headed and jumped in with the original Google Home. Expectations were through the roof. The thinking was that Google had spent decades building the world's most powerful search engine and had Android baked into hundreds of millions of phones, so catching up to Amazon's early lead would be easy. People wanted a genuinely smart assistant, one that could do more than help you order paper towels, and they were betting Google's knowledge graph would be the thing to deliver it. In the early days, Google Home held up its end of the bargain. Where Alexa usually needed you to phrase things just right, Google Assistant felt more like talking to an actual person. It understood follow-up questions without needing to hear "Hey Google" again, and it could handle multiple requests crammed into one sentence. If you had either of these back in the day, as I did, you would know. Neither could stand up to what we use today, but they were both really impressive. However, I would say that Google was better at the time. Over time, Google built out a whole product family around that amazing setup. The idea was that everything would work together. Your Nest thermostat, your lights, your calendar, your Gmail, your YouTube, all of them talking to each other through a single assistant. Thread and Matter standards really helped this idea. For a while, it genuinely looked like Google was better, but Amazon never took it lying down. Google is the best competitor, but that means little Gemini makes simple tasks way too frustrating Credit: Google One of the worst parts about Google is also one of the best depending on how you look at it. A lot of the recent pain comes from the messy transition away from the old Google Assistant to Gemini. The new 2026 Google Home Speaker is built around Gemini from the ground up, and when you set one up, it pushes your entire household over to that platform. The problem is that Gemini doesn't let you set a different language on a per-device basis, so if you live somewhere with a language it doesn't fully support yet, you're stuck building a clunky two-home workaround just to keep your older speakers running. Once your devices are split across two separate virtual homes, they can't be grouped for multi-room audio, so your old Nest Audio and Mini speakers end up sitting there, essentially cut off from everything else. On top of that, the original Google Assistant had a real conversational feel to it, but Gemini's shift to a cloud-based language model has made basic commands feel less reliable. It can misunderstand a simple request, answer questions you didn't ask, dive too far into unrelated information, or just fail to pause or skip a song. To work around the misunderstandings, you have to speak unnaturally slowly and use very specific phrasing sometimes. This is even the case on your phone sometimes. Otherwise, the speaker might randomly interrupt mid-sentence to read out the time. Then there's the performance side. Google still routes a lot of basic commands through the cloud, which means requests take longer as the signal bounces from your device to Google's servers, then to a third-party service, then back again. When Google's backend is having a bad day, that can stretch. Google keeps killing off products you paid for Alexa feels easier to use than Gemini The most glaring issue that I have with Google is its habit of killing off its own products with little warning. Dropcam, Nest Secure, and now the first- and second-generation Nest Learning Thermostats are all either dead or being cut off from cloud support and Wi-Fi. You spend good money on premium hardware, and Google can strip it of many functions pretty much overnight. On top of that, there are cases where routine software updates have bricked devices outright, as seen on Reddit. The software side has its own issues. When Google folded Gemini into the Home ecosystem, it replaced straightforward command execution with an AI language model doing the interpretation. Asking it to toggle a plug or flip a light can now lead to a delay or nothing at all. Worse, Gemini sometimes treats a routine trigger as a search query and just ignores it. Fixing this can be a pain, and it's generally not something you'll get with Alexa. If I compared the two, I'd say Alexa feels a lot more natural to use than Gemini. Privacy is another thing worth considering, especially if you're comparing ecosystems. Google stores voice recordings and interaction histories in the cloud by default, and that data can feed into advertising profiles. You can delete your Google recordings or set them to auto-delete, but you have to know to look for the setting in the first place. I like Alexa better than Gemini Google's smart home setup isn't a lost cause, but it has too many changes to feel safe to use. The pattern that I've been seeing makes it hard to believe in Google. If you're buying into smart homes for the first time, that history matters. Alexa isn't perfect either, but it doesn't make you feel like you're working around it. Google still has the smarter brain underneath, which makes it more frustrating that the day-to-day experience keeps getting in the way of it. Echo Pop Display No Dimensions 3.9” x 3.3” x 3.6” Looking for a stylish addition to your smart home? This smart speaker looks great and sounds great.