Smart Home Showdown: Google vs. Amazon, Apple's Ecosystem Intrigue, and the Rise of Wi-Fi 7. E-20

Embark on a journey through the ever-evolving landscape of smart home technology as we pit Google Home Assistant against Amazon Echo, revealing the nuanced differences that could sway your decision. I'll even share my own amusing tales of setting up and navigating the smart thermostat world, featuring Nest and Ecobee. We're not just talking specs here—I'll pull back the curtain on the real-world user experience, from voice command accuracy to the unexpected ways Google-enabled smoke alarms can give you peace of mind. And if you've ever wondered about the critical role of cross-platform connectivity, you're about to find out why it's the unsung hero of smart home functionality.

Tune in for a candid exploration of Apple's ecosystem, including the saga of iMessage's integration—or lack thereof—with Android, and how this tech tussle has broader implications that might just catch the eye of antitrust regulators. For a touch of live-action tech testing, I take the OBS Bot Tiny camera for a spin mid-conversation, showcasing its dynamic zoom capabilities while we navigate the quirks of home automation. And I must confess, we've been pondering the allure of 4K streaming, contemplating whether our viewers would prefer breathtaking sunsets to looking at our own faces—spoiler alert: the sunsets are winning.

Capping off this tech treasure trove, we dive into the latest mobile devices riding the Wi-Fi 6 wave, promising a future of unparalleled connectivity. We'll also offer updates on the Apple Watch's courtroom drama with Massimo, and how Starlink's stationary dish is redefining satellite internet services. I'm even letting you in on a little secret—an investment I've made in the wearable tech space that has me eagerly awaiting Apple's rumored foray into AR with the Apple Vision Pro. By the end, you'll feel the excitement that's been building since the days of the one megabit chip of 1984—a true testament to the breathtaking pace of technological advancement.

Transcript

Adam: 0:00

Today in five acre tech, we're going to talk about the Google Home Assistant and to follow up basically on what we've done with the review kind of of the home assistants that are out there, such as the Amazon Echo, google Home Assistant and HomePod. Today Ronnie Tofty is off. Today I'll be doing the show solo.

Ronnie: 0:29

What the?

Adam: 0:30

heck is that? Oh, I forgot, we're all here. I'm just showing off our new camera and all of this. Ready, ronnie, I'm ready. I'm five acre tech.

Ronnie: 1:08

I'm Adam Oghan and I'm Ronnie Tofty.

Adam: 1:11

And this is five acre tech, but you already knew that Pretty much, yeah, pretty much.

Ronnie: 1:16

I have to clarify something, because if you are listening to this and not watching it, they wouldn't have seen what you left at. Yeah, they wouldn't have.

Adam: 1:22

So what you need to do is not only listen to it, or, if you prefer to do it, you can watch it on YouTube. Go to our website at fiveacretechcom, as you see right there below, and there's a link to the YouTube version of the podcast and a lot more things that are becoming soon.

Ronnie: 1:43

So what I did when he was talking, it was zoomed in on Adam and I made my hand look like the thing from the monsters.

Adam: 1:50

Yeah, it was pretty funny it was pretty funny.

Adam: 1:56

Okay, so this is five acre tech. This episode has been released today, monday, january 8th 2024, episode 20. Don't forget, you can always go to Ronnie and his wife's website, mermaidmamaorg, and buy your stuff, anything you want to look for there. Pretty cool, pretty cool. But today we're going to talk about the Google Home Assistant, which I'm going to prep with the meeting of the microphone that we have right here. And there's the Google Home Assistant and we're going to talk about a few things that it can do and, you know, give kind of an idea of what it can do and can't do. I'm not sure. I don't use it very often, so Ronnie probably uses it more than I do, even though he uses just you know, he has an Android phone, I have an Apple phone, so he may be more familiar with it than I am. But hey, google, what can you do?

Google: 3:00

Try saying interpret from English to Spanish, or play hey soul sister on office display.

Adam: 3:08

Well, the first one we can do. The second one we can't. But so it's very similar to the Amazon Echo. You can do home automation with it. You can do lots of things with it. What were you reading earlier about the differences between the two?

Ronnie: 3:29

Yeah, they said that Alex is a little better. In that it's sorry. The echo is a little bit better, as in more things connect to it Right In your house, but the Google is more accurate. So when you ask it a question or ask it to do things, it was 93% accurate, versus the echo was 78 or 79% accurate.

Adam: 3:58

So, yeah, it is a little bit better when it comes to understanding what you're saying. I've noticed and I've had other people say the same thing to me over the years, so it's got that for it. It's really a choice of which one you would like to go with or which one you've already owned. It's just one of those, one of those things that it's a preference. I think they're probably very close in what they can do and can't do. If you've used any home assistant at all the Amazon Echo I started with that one and just kept with it. This is actually probably my second home assistant and it's not bad, it's good, it's got its, it's got its place. They're trying to keep up, yeah, so I do a pretty good job.

Adam: 4:52

Yeah, I think so. It's going to be interesting doing the one about the HomePod from Apple because it's, I think, quite a bit different and what it can do.

Ronnie: 5:04

I know my friend had this one and they, when they remodeled their house, they took out their smoke alarms and they put in Google smoke alarms, and so what that did is, you know, whenever you're cooking something and you burn it or it's just smoky and it goes off and you're fanning it trying to get it, and then they just they, there's talks to them, yeah, this is an annoying screaming thing, and then when it needs to scream, it like it knows, and then it does.

Adam: 5:32

So it's not like it only talks to you, but now, I haven't tried that, but I believe you can actually do the same thing with the, the nest smoke alarm. Back to the Amazon Echo, back when Google bot nest out it was real interesting they decided, hey, we're going to, we're going to go ahead and get rid of, we're not going to let anybody else connect to us, you know. So I had a nest thermostat and I'm like, oh great. So I prepped, bought a different brand, and then they decided, hey, we're going to allow it. After all, you know, cross platform because they were already there. They were getting the complaints, you know, like any other company, you know that decides to do things themselves, and so that's where we're at. So I believe it can work.

Adam: 6:20

I don't know, I have not tried that with the nest smoke alarm, but I know the nest thermostat will work pretty much. But I've had a problem and this is real interesting, this is talking about a problem and I went back to nest for a while and then I went to ecobee Second time. I already had it, actually I think I bought another one, bought another one with the built in Amazon Echo, which was really not the thing to have turned on, and I actually turned that feature off because I had so many in my house already. So one of the things I noticed with all of the thermostats is, all of a sudden, my timers that I set up, or schedules that I set up, were basically not working correctly. They were just having an issue where all of a sudden it comes on and at a different time it's not turning off in the morning and man, I thought, okay, so the nest is not working. Good, this is a horrible thermostat, the way I think. And then the ecobee I thought the same thing. And then I bought the Amazon very inexpensive $59 thermostat. And guess what? Same problem. I filled up, amazon said, hey, I needed to remove it completely from the system. Factory defaulted put it out, put it back, and it started working. So at that point the other ones should have worked, and the only reason I'm thinking that they should have worked is because the oh, how do you say it? It started, oh, started having the same problem again. So basically, I was having the same problem again, all over again. So there is a slight flaw there. So I reported it. I'm sure they knew about it the way they were talking. I'm going to have to call them up again.

Adam: 8:21

Amazon is really good about accepting phone calls. Once you find how to get ahold of them on their echo team, it's incredible. They are very helpful. So when we move out to the new property, which is what this five acre tech is all about getting to that property and building out new home automation, new things and the latest of the and greatest will be talking about that, because basically, I'm going to start my account all over. I'm going to actually call them and say, hey, can you just delete everything? Is there a way to do it? Is there a way to recreate the account, because it's back from the beginning? Maybe there's a flaw in my account, I don't know Something to think about.

Adam: 9:02

Yeah, I'm going to talk to him about it, because I'm, you know, I'm going to stick with Amazon. Yeah, I think it's where I need to be, and now that we have the matter coming out, which is a communication protocol that everybody can communicate and Apple says they'll use it also, so it's going to be a standard Things are going to get a lot easier. Everything is coming out with matter now, gotcha.

Ronnie: 9:26

Yeah, the article I read says the same thing. It's like you choose what you want, they're all good.

Adam: 9:31

They're all good. There really is no bad. It's just what do you prefer? I have to say, I have to tell you about the sound quality when we get to the home pod versus all of these. That's going to be an interesting topic. So when we get to that point, when we do the final review of all three, we'll go through there and I'll actually hopefully have a song that's out there that I can play on all three. Nice, yeah, legally. So let's see what happens with that.

Ronnie: 10:08

Cool, so bleepers dead.

Adam: 10:11

Yeah.

Ronnie: 10:13

Beepers dead, beepers dead, yep. They tried to incorporate iMessage into the Android and Apple said no Yep.

Adam: 10:26

So for those of you who may have just heard this for the first time, we've been talking about Beeper. It's a company that decided to try to get the blue bubble where it needs to be for Android people and make Beeper work with everything better when it comes to cross platform or from Android phone to iPhone. To iMessage yeah iMessage to communicate like iMessage, and Apple said no.

Ronnie: 10:55

They even got the like I said. They thought they could go through antitrust laws and all this stuff.

Adam: 11:01

Yeah.

Ronnie: 11:02

Apple is too powerful.

Adam: 11:03

Yeah, it really. It really seemed like that they were just trying to get a little bit of attention, but you never know, everybody has their own marketing ways of doing things. Yeah, we, we. Our marketing skill is this right here, we're going to do everything in Morse code, okay.

Ronnie: 11:22

Morse code.

Adam: 11:23

Yep Morse code or less code. Maybe it will sound like this Do you hear that, ronnie? No, it's not coming out. Oh well, we tried. We're trying to actually go with a different system. We're working on it, trying to go to OBS, and we're still using StreamYard, which is an incredible tool. Highly recommend it. But we're just trying new things out on the podcast, so see if we can better anything or not. We got a new camera. We got a new camera. We got the OBS Tiny camera Very nice little camera. Let's see. I've got the OBS Bot Tiny 2. Very cool. I think I can do a hand signal. Let's try it.

Adam: 12:28

Yeah, I zoomed in, that's pretty cool, you didn't even know about that did you. Zoom back out or zoom yeah.

Ronnie: 12:37

Should start small and then go big.

Adam: 12:41

So that's cool.

Ronnie: 12:42

So those of you who are on podcast, you can get to see him zoom in with his hands.

Adam: 12:45

Yes, I used my hands. I did two losers.

Ronnie: 12:51

Loser left and loser right.

Adam: 12:52

Loser left and loser right symbol and just move in and it starts to zoom in. Of course it didn't do it that time. I probably waited too long. Well, oh well.

Google: 13:07

If you would have. It's a work in progress.

Ronnie: 13:09

Yeah, it's a work in progress.

Google: 13:09

It worked the first time.

Adam: 13:11

Yeah, so we can also individually very cool tool, individually just zoom in on each other. So as I'm having a long conversation, I can leave Ronnie completely out and he whoa what happened there? How did you do that, ronnie, with my hand? I don't think so, no, but you could. Actually. I don't know if we can do that with our hand, but these are presets on a remote which I'm going to show you now.

Ronnie: 13:36

Oh, the zoom right there.

Adam: 13:38

So, yeah, it's a zoom preset and pretty cool, pretty cool. I can't wait till we can do this completely 4k. Right now we're doing everything through Streamlab. Hopefully they go to 4k soon, but they're just 1080p and it'd be nice that we, if we, could do 4k through them. They could be a little better. A lot of the complaints is not enough 4k content out there, so we're trying to make that happen, but Because you want to see our pretty faces in 4k. Oh, yeah, yeah, especially as long as we are.

Ronnie: 14:11

It's important.

Adam: 14:12

Every wrinkle, every problem. That's why we stay so far back.

Ronnie: 14:20

But the video we had last week we should have been great in 4k. Yes, that two weeks ago.

Adam: 14:25

Yeah, that was a pretty incredible video. One thing we are going to do on days that we can do this outside and it's not windy like it was today, or is today.

Ronnie: 14:35

Cause it's always nice and sunny.

Adam: 14:37

Yeah, it's 70 degrees today it's plenty, plenty beautiful, it's just. We're going to do these outside cause. I think it's a lot nicer than having to see the same thing.

Ronnie: 14:48

You guys seem to enjoy it. More people watched our video cause there's a pretty sunset behind us.

Adam: 14:51

Yeah, so we'll try Apparently. They don't like looking at us. No, they like the sunset, so we'll give a nice background.

Ronnie: 14:56

Okay, yeah, you need to find a pretty girl to sit next to us.

Adam: 15:00

Yeah, that can happen. Most girls are all over, so what can this thing do? Or do you got anything else?

Ronnie: 15:11

Are we done with this? No, we can keep talking about it. Keep going, then.

Adam: 15:15

So what else can this do? I know it can do home automation. Let's ask it. Hey Google, how can you do home automation?

Google: 15:27

On the website securityorg. They say the hallmark of home automation is remote control, which is done through either a mobile application or through a voice assistant. Mobile application. Hey Google stop.

Adam: 15:39

So that that didn't get exactly what I asked, but I may not have asked the question correctly, so we'll have to try that again next time. And hey, google go home. So I went back home. So it's just like you know, just like the Amazon Echo. Basically we don't have it where we sound great. They all sound really good.

Ronnie: 16:06

They all stories, do all that fun stuff, just like the echo. Yeah, let's, let's try that.

Adam: 16:13

Um, hey, Google, tell a kid's story.

Google: 16:19

Sure a story about kids. Here's one from Storynory on Google Playbooks. It's called Hansel and Gretel.

Adam: 16:28

Great, we don't want to scare the kids.

Google: 16:30

Hansel and Gretel Long.

Adam: 16:34

Hey Google, stop. Hey Google, go home. So you can't do pretty much anything. I mean anything you can think of Turn lights on, turn lights off. I don't have it set up for that here. Um, it's, it's it. This can be a lot of work. Um, when you set up home automation, the one thing you should think in advance is how far do you want to go with this, because it is quite a lot of work. Um, google routines are basic or, excuse me, um, the Amazon Echo routines are really where everything's at. You can. You can build all sorts of really crazy things, as I've done in here before, as we've shown you, where you know we can turn on and off different things, change color of the lights Um, pretty incredible, absolutely incredible. Um, but that's just kind of one of those things that you have to choose. So, really, in the beginning, if you're going to do this, choose the one you want, because if you have to go back, it's like really tough it can be, mm, hmm.

Ronnie: 17:42

Yeah.

Adam: 17:44

See what else you got, anything else.

Ronnie: 17:46

Well, I only something away from that, anything away from this.

Adam: 17:49

Okay.

Ronnie: 17:50

Well, I was going to talk about copilot. Oh yeah, copilot, copilot. If you don't know what copilot is, it's Microsoft's new version of AI. They're actually going to put a button, like they did while back on the the Microsoft keyboards, that you could have the Microsoft button. Now it's literally got going to have a copilot button, so your keyboard can, you can quickly access it. And again there's. We said this a couple of weeks ago that it's supposed to be a much superior AI to some of the other ones that are out there.

Adam: 18:23

So if you've bought a keyboard already, don't worry. Microsoft will somehow figure out how to put that button on your keyboard. It's kind of like Google Prime now yesterday you know they're still working on that. They're still working on that and the workout out how to get that extra key on your keyboard. You can always buy an any key and just stick it on there, just glue it on your board.

Ronnie: 18:46

Yeah, just glue it on the board.

Adam: 18:48

Maybe there'll be an aftermarket button somebody can make to do that, or you can, or a button I've been messing with lately is called flick F L I C, and that's a pretty incredible button for home automation, so you may be able to program it to do that. What is flick? I don't have it right here right in front of me, but I could go get it with our new camera thing. If you had something to say for a long period of time, I can go to the other room and get it. I don't have something to say?

Ronnie: 19:18

Yeah, well you're right on the spot. What does flick do? Flick versus we don't have to see it necessarily.

Adam: 19:26

No flick is just a little home automated button. They have a hub that goes with it. They have their own hub and you can either press it once, press it twice or press and hold. I'm actually testing it for a product that I'm trying to figure out how to do in a decent price, a decent you know, where it doesn't cost too much. Basically, one of the customers I have says hey, we want, you know system for our employees, you know a panic button system. How can we do this? I got a quote for $30,000 and this is absolutely way too much money. So could we do it cheaper? Yeah, well, look, how well does it work? Don't know yet. There is a way to do it with that. I'm still investigating that.

Adam: 20:17

Otherwise, the next step is to use another product, which is probably something I can talk about soon, depending on what product we get is a more of a office phone type button. Doesn't look like an office phone but it acts like one. But it's a single button. You can press and hold and it will dial voice of rip into its own little server and then go out. The voice of rip of that little server Basically looks like a router that fits in a rack and you were they. They can press that button. It goes in, connects to your phone system, connects to any phone system. We'll do whatever you tell it to do. So it would go to 911.

Ronnie: 21:01

Yeah, not necessarily, but it could.

Adam: 21:03

Okay, it could, and leave a message saying hey, you know we're having an incident here and it's at this desk, right the hospital I worked at had had those buttons.

Ronnie: 21:15

I mean, I didn't install them, but sometimes they would act up and we had to mess with them. But yeah it's 911. Real interesting.

Adam: 21:26

I don't know if you've heard about Wi-Fi seven yet. Wi-fi six is mainly everywhere. And as we were talking, I just cut an email from ubiquity talking about unified Wi-Fi seven. What's that? Literally just got it. So it's the latest version of wireless and basically, as they're claiming on no-transcript, it could basically connect a mobile phone device up to 2000 megabits, so 2216.3 megabits, through their system using Wi-Fi 7. So it's going to be quite interesting. Wonder what it's going to cost? Yeah, that's the big question, right? $189. Oh, that answers that question really quick. That's the power of the internet. We just found out about it. We gave it to you. We definitely have to title that on the very, on the on the title Unify Wi-Fi 7.

Adam: 22:31

It's out, go get it. I don't know what will support it. You can provide it, but you know, I think, if I'm if I'm not mistaken, iphone 15 supports it. I'm sure some of the new Samsung funds support it. Probably Google, google Pixel supports it. So interesting, and it does make it. It does make a difference to have it faster. This is all Wi-Fi 6 in here. My next house will be Wi-Fi 6 or 7. And it does make a difference for your mobile devices to connect as fast as they can. It really makes a difference because it's not a lot of wasting time, not a lot of buffering, yeah.

Ronnie: 23:15

Did? I forgot to look about this and I don't know if you read it, so we may not have an answer for everyone, but did they figure out the eye watch problem? The Apple watch yeah, the Apple watch.

Adam: 23:29

They got an injunction.

Ronnie: 23:30

Right.

Adam: 23:31

And they're able to sell them again, but I haven't heard anymore about it. That's all I know, is they can temporarily sell them again.

Ronnie: 23:37

That's what I had seen. An article is because the company that was trying to stop them was called Massimo, I think.

Adam: 23:43

Right.

Ronnie: 23:45

And the article I read was more about like I can't believe they took on Apple because it's, you know, small company versus big company and Massimo might be pretty big to itself, but sometimes it's tough. But, yeah, interesting, interesting stuff Was the other thing. Oh, next gen Starlink was out. Oh yeah.

Adam: 24:10

That's interesting. Yeah, I'm going to pick up a few things on that, on how the installation of that is. It's quite different. It does not look like it has a motorized dish that will point to the right direction. So it looks like that you have to kind of point it where they tell you and then it will tell you if you're on. You know.

Ronnie: 24:34

But it doesn't have to be so accurate, like like when you installed a like a dish for your TV remember those were, like you know those.

Adam: 24:43

yeah, those are a needle in a haystack type brain, and this is just pointing to a direction where the satellites that they want you to connect to which are moving across the sky. For example, if this was the dish, they're just moving across the sky and can see the dish at all times until the next one comes over. It could be coming this way, it could be going that way and multiple not dish satellites can come by and basically that's how it connects. It's not it just it's stationary. It doesn't need to connect to any certain location, but it does like a certain location for, basically, added, what happened? I don't know. I think I turned on a hand signal here. Let's just go back and then we'll. Since I'm talking, it wants to hear me. Is that what it is? Yeah, I need to turn off that feature.

Ronnie: 25:34

Somehow, somehow, I hit a. I did a hand signal, now I can pick my nose. When I was looking.

Adam: 25:38

Yeah, so if you scratch your nose next time, I'll just hit that button so we can see you do it, but the satellites will come by. I'll try not to use any hand motions, just use finger and connect to the to the satellites.

Ronnie: 25:57

So Do you know all the hand motions for?

Adam: 25:59

the camera. No, I don't.

Ronnie: 26:01

Evidently, whatever you did caused it to like. Yeah almost like the camera fell yeah.

Adam: 26:08

It's just it's a, you know it's on a gimbal, so you know we can control it to access gimbal, can also tell it to go to sleep. It's kind of cool Hand signals. I can zoom in, zoom out. It's even even when we are going to have some kind of documentation. We can put it on a table right in front of it, have this right in front of us and hit a button and it'll just look straight down Right at the you know, the documentation or whatever we have in front of us, you know looking at.

Adam: 26:39

So one more thing this was real interesting. I got a text, I got an email. Well, actually, before that email, I want to tell you guys about something that I was Wow and it went up. So I'm making money now. So there is a stock called WLDS wearable devices. So about a few shares, just whatever I could afford and my understanding we're going to do some more research.

Adam: 27:15

There's a company that is going to either they're working with Apple or a similar company that is doing all the Tony Stark stuff from Iron man where you can move your hands across, and all sorts of stuff using their new Apple Visor device that they're going to be releasing real soon. I'm not even sure what that thing's called, just really don't remember, but once that's out, so vision, apple vision pro. So if you haven't seen that, look up some videos on YouTube. It's incredible. We'll leave you a link Maybe, maybe not, I can remember and we'll leave you a link on what it does and what it looks like when you're looking at it. So basically it's, it's augmented reality and it's going to be pretty incredible. I mean it's.

Adam: 28:15

It's you can work on multiple computers at the same time. You can be in a plane watching a movie on 110 inch screen or something like that, even though you're in a seat with somebody right behind you, because it can just sit out in the middle of nowhere and you can see it Not just you know, not in the way of anybody, or or you're viewing. So it's really neat device. I don't know if I'll ever get it, but sure would be cool to look into it. So yeah, you got anything else.

Ronnie: 28:51

I don't think so.

Adam: 28:54

I think you're going to look at something in history. Oh, what was it?

Ronnie: 29:00

I don't remember. Hold on, let me pull it up real quick. It was the first.

Google: 29:04

Oh, mega big chip.

Adam: 29:06

Yeah, the first mega big for 1984. Pretty interesting, that's when I graduated 1984. Wow, you're old? Yeah, pretty much. So. It was the first one megabit chip, very, pretty incredible. Now that can get you probably maybe a quarter second of this show nowadays, but who knows?

Ronnie: 29:39

Yeah, who knows, they've come a long way, right.

Adam: 29:42

Yeah, so I think that's about it for today. Cool, if you don't have anything else. Adios, adios, and until the next episode, which will be home pod.