Wow, I don’t know what’s wrong with your Alexa devices but my experience (with five of them) has never been as bad as what you described. I also have two devices with Google Assistant and they work well except for two or three instances where they worked too well. They responded to dialog spoken on the TV yet there was no invocation of their wake word. I checked the log and nothing sounded even remotely like Hey or OK Google.
Good luck finding something that works better for you. Let us know how it goes.
I had a old echo dot / gmini.
After the recent firesale I got a bunch of google devices.
Alexa definitely far excels in the recognition department for me. Hands down. The Drop in feature of Echos is really nice too.
Alexa does a better job of understanding my 3yo and immigrant wife w/ substandard english as well.
The emulated Hue that used to work was awesome too.
I got the Google Assistant integration working but its pretty clunky and far from brainless to setup.
VoxCommando was better than Alexa.
VoxCommando w/ XBMC/Kodi was amazing the minute detail you could do.
Well, come to think of it, when i use basic Amazon commands directly with my Echos, it works fine. It’s the intergrations with Hass/Nodfe red that it cant seem to understand. Although i don’t know what a 3rd party skill would have to do with it recognizing what I’m saying? But who knows
I’m using two different Node-Red nodes to integrate Home Assistant with Alexa. One performs Hue emulation (works well) and the other allows me to create custom voice commands (works but sometimes loses its connection with Alexa’s cloud services).
Look at Almond it’s a HA thing directly.
I honestly don’t understand your problem with Google Assistant though. It works flawlessly and integrates with HA perfectly well. (I am using the manual integration not Nabu Casa too)
I find Alexa actually does pretty good, you can always ask it What did I just say?
I find Google Assistant is terrible at detecting when I say “Hey Google”, but it does pretty well once it hears me.
I’m reminded of am old joke where an elderly fellow tells his doctor that his wife is hard of hearing. The doctor asks him to quantify it but the old gent doesn’t know how. So the doctor instructs him to go home and call out his wife’s name from the doorstep, if she doesn’t respond then come closer and repeat her name. Repeat this process as many times as needed until she finally answers. When she does, take note of the distance.
The white-haired gentleman rushes home, eager to carry out the experiment. To his dismay, there’s no response to any of his calls as he progressively makes his way through the house. Finally, when he’s in the very same room as her, she whirls around, red-faced, angry as hell, and blurts out “For the fifth and final time you old fool, I’m in the damn kitchen!”
So maybe the Alexa/Google troubles aren’t the fault of the listener but the speaker?
I’m using node-red-contrib-alexa-remote2 to INIT Alexa TTS and routines, and node-red-contrib-alexa-home-skill to register a node with Alexa as a device.
That’s the thing, i do ask “what did i just say” a lot to understand the problem. I’m speaking. Like. A. Child. Saying. Alexa. Open. Shades. With a standard North American accent and clear and concise words. But yet it takes that as “did you mean kitchen?” 8/10 times. I usually have to close all the windows and doors (if open), turn off any TVs or stereos on anywhere around it (even if playing at a whispers level) and once in absolute dead silence and speaking like I would to a 356 yr old man, it then picks it up right after the 3rd or 4th time.
I use alexa-remote2 but not alexa-home-skill because that requires creating an account with an unfamiliar cloud service whose reputation is unknown to me.
thank you very much. humour is always a good start for the day.
I’ve taken the whole alexa missing commands more lightly; in fairness it works reasonably well, but it still errs every now and then.
I just take it as perfectly normal female behaviour
Apart from my sole Google Home Mini (original version, not the improved Nest branded one) my Google Homes perform really well. I find that in many places in my house multiple Homes will detect my call and then they work out which is is closest to speak the reply. Actions to control HA entities have been flawless. The only issue of late has been that after performing the action (turn light or whatever on/off) there have been announcements to say that HA cloud could not be reached, despite it actually working…? That only started with HA 0.110 or 0.111, I’m not sure exactly when
I wish i was. It’s getting worse and worse every week. The only thing I haven’t tried is looking at ways to “reset” its voice recognition stuff. I’m in Canada, so were basically at the end of the stick when it comes to updates and features for our echos, but this started happening a lot more in the past few weeks. So I’m going to check that timeframe to any updates they might have sent it. If all else fails, ill try a google home mini etc, after that… i give up. I yell at this damn Alexa more then my kids - and they’re both shit disturbers!
I think people think I’m exaggerating the problem here, tomorrow ill take a video of me speaking to it slow, clear, and perfectly understandable, and it replying with “did you mean kitchen?” Which, btw, is the response she gives to any and all commands she doesn’t understand — regardless of what i say. I could say “Alexa, booga booga booga” and she’s reply with “did you mean kitchen?” So i think there’s a bigger problem then just understanding.
I’ll agree with you. Alexa is Frustrating. I call her bitch at least once a day I bet.
I think what irks me the most is that if I could get access to the text of her interpretation of what I said she would be doing things perfectly. But alas. Here we are.
Also I think that having her so long and knowing things once worked one way and now they don’t because Amazon changes things is also frustrating.
If I had a nice looking box to replace her with that spit out text, I would in a heart beat.
Try deleting all voice history. Her comprehension levels deteriorate over time on all my echo devices for some reason, but every time I delete all voice history - it vastly improves! I do it every couple of months.
Android Alexa app - Settings - Account Settings - History - in the drop-down menu choose ‘All History’ and then push the delete button.
I have pretty much the same with all of mine, she slowly goes deaf over time! Two of mine are original models, so thats probably 3/4’s through its life by now, so understandable I guess
Wow my alexa is nothing like that. I find that recognition works better when you speak more naturally than w/ an abnormal cadence where u slow down thinking that would be better but its not.
It’s like Snips but still existing