Paul’s Tech Makeover: Google Ekes Out an Audio Win (Premium)

Our move to Pennsylvania over two and a half years ago was, among other things, an opportunity for us to start thinking about transitioning not just to a new home but to a new kind of home, one that would provide smart home functionality.

This was always going to be a slow process, and for a number of reasons, chief among them that the smart home market is still, today, evolving, and because I want to be cognizant of the fact that more technology isn’t always better. My wife isn’t a huge fan of many smart home gadgets, and we also do an annual (usually three weeks long) home swap, and I don’t want anyone coming here to worry about hidden cameras and other kinds of surveillance.

As I noted way back in January, our embrace of smart home technology has been modest at best. We’ve completely dropped cable TV and now only rely on services like Netflix, Hulu, and the like. We have numerous Philips Hue smart lights in and outside of the house, and that usage actually did expand in 2019. We use Google Wi-Fi for mesh wireless networking around this large house, and it has been incredibly reliable and worry-free. I spent a good chunk of the first half of 2019 digitizing my entire paper photo collection, and while there is still some organization to finish up, that work is largely done.

And then there’s Google Home and Google Assistant.

We’ve had several of these devices---two Google Homes and two Google Home Minis---spread around the home for a while now, and we added a Lenovo Smart Display to the kitchen in 2018 and then a Lenovo Smart Clock to the master bedroom in 2019. We also use Chromecast Audio connected to a pair of studio monitor speakers in the sunroom and this $129 combination outperforms a pair of Sonos One Speaker that cost almost $400.

The Chromecast works wonderfully. But as far as Google Home and ambient computing are concerned, we pretty much ran into a wall in 2019, and I assume this is pretty common with others as well, no matter which digital personal assistant you’ve settled on: We just don’t use it very much.

To be clear, I still feel like ambient computing is the next big computing wave. But as has been the case with so many of my predictions about the future, the transition from here to there is taking far longer than I expected. And this despite incredible advances, both with Google Assistant and with its competitors.

But our interactions with Google Assistant, generally through Google Home devices, but sometimes via our phones as well, has been sporadic. “Hey Google, what’s the weather?” “Hey Google, tell me the news.” That kind of thing. We do “use” the smart display in the sense that it’s just sitting there displaying an ever-evolving photo slideshow of family and friends; and I like that I can say “Hey Google, share that photo” when I see a picture I want to send to my wife or a friend. But that’s about it.

Part of the problem with this whole thing is just the ...