The fight between Google Home and Amazon Alexa is far from over. The last round was won by the Echo Dot and Routines. It appears that Google Home isn’t far behind, I discovered how easy is to pass notifications to the smart speaker. Has Google Home gained the edge over Alexa? Let’s talk about Google Home notifications.
Google Home Notifications
Google Home notifications are not limited to your phone push messages. Thanks to NodeRED you are able to push any information to your smart speaker. I want to find a similar solution for Alexa as well.
In my showcase, you will see that I requested the notifications from the phone by simply asking Google Assistant to start fetching these. On top of that, I get my PC to update the speaker about its power state. Since the information can be processed via Tasker, Computer, Raspberry Pi, you can send anything, at any time.
The Google Home notifications will be announced to you without asking for it. It’s possible to create a backlog of recent notifications as well, so you could check what messages have been sent to you, just in case you had to step out, but I have not implemented it.
Conclusion
Smart speakers are still very limited. To get anything out of it other than voice googling for answers you need to have either 1000s skills installed or be greeted with the “I’m sorry I can’t do that yet” message. Being in total control of what’s being played through your smart speaker, while having the unrestricted access to Google Services at the same time is the way I want to go! Here is the tutorial for you!
