Choosing between the Google Home and Amazon Echo for your smart home ambitions may be tricky, but Google is aiming to make things easier by releasing a list of all the gadgets its smart speaker works with.
While the list will inevitably grow a more companies create smart home devices which they’ll want to have play nicely with the Google Assistant, the smart speaker in both its original and Mini form already work with a healthy list of devices and smart home tech partners.
To name but a few, support is offered for Samsung’s Smart Things smart hub and its Artik platform, connected light bulbs from the likes of Philips Hue and TP-Link, Honeywell smart thermostats, Canary security products, and RoboVac robotic vacuum cleaners.
Essentially, if you’re looking to buy a Google Home and wondering if it will support any other smart tech you have in your house, then this is the list to address.
One of the main challenges with smart home tech is there’s a lot of disparate systems with different connectivity standards, their own apps and software ecosystem, all of which makes it difficult to find that one device or tool to control them all.
The efforts of Google and Amazon with their smart hub speakers appear to be going some way to address that problem.
But there’s still a lot of fragmentation in the smart home world, which will over time require companies to come together and adopt some form of connectivity, security and integration standards so all these devices can work nicely together, realising the futuristic idea of a proper smart home.
Related: Google Home vs Amazon Echo
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
