Google Home Mini

So there have been several Google products leaked today that are coming soon, a couple of phones, a Chromebook, and the one I'm really interested in the most, the google home mini.

So this is supposedly going to cost just $50. There's not a whole lot known, but the prediction is that it's a pretty standard voice controlled device, it plays music, sets reminders and schedules, etc.

Here's my question for you guys, does anyone have a Google Home or Alexa or an Echo? And if so has it made your life any simpler? If it can make my life a bit simpler or easier it would be well worth fifty bucks in my opinion and I may get one. Also on a less important note I think that these look a bit niftier than the cylindrical kind, it looks like it could fit in better among my other home decor.

http://www.droid-life.com/2017/09/19/google-home-mini-exclusive/

Yes yes yes, but it could provide me recipies.

@br0kenrabbit said:

They look a bit like those stones you use to scrape dead skin off your feet.

@stormcast: True, but with the exception of the orange one I also picture it on a shelf looking quite appropriate with other home decore.

got an echo as a gift back in 2015. it's alright. we don't use it to its full capacity. we'll play music over it occasionally. ask it random questions that come up in discussions ( last night i needed to know how many years 25,000 days was. turns out it's about 68 ).

one of the most useful features for us since it's sitting in our kitchen is just to use to to set timers for things when cooking.

there are a lot of skills that can be installed on it to do all kinds of other things. just haven't explored it that much. it'll go off by mistake often too because it's always listening.

the TV can trigger if often as well.

http://mashable.com/2017/09/14/south-park-alexa-google-home-nsfw-cartman/#QUEOJQljsiqy

Now playing "Turk Our Durr" by Joni Mitchell.

One of my friends has connected his lighting, central heating, speakers and alarm to Alexa. It actually all works very well but he did have to spend circa £500 to do so. It is very impressive to ask Alexa to play music and match the lights to said music though.

Honestly the bit about controlling your lights is one thing that doesn't hold much appeal to me. Yes technically it means saving myself a three second walk to a lightswitch, but that walk basically doesn't cause me any sort of measurable stress that I have ever been aware of, and that's what I'm interested in this device for, making things easier and reducing stress.

Yeah it's not something I'm in any rush to implement in to my home. He just said 'I had a spare bit of cash so thought why not'. Pretty much the only reason.

One of my buddies installed an Echo in every room in her house. When she first installed them she tried to order a pizza and got three of them.

I've used them. I'm not really a fan in most cases, but I think that's also because I've gotten really good at boolean searches and voice searching/asking seems really clumsy. I value precision over the luxury of using voice.

The one thing that I've found really useful for the concept is queuing up a long list of items based on criteria and don't really care if it's 100% accurate. For example, I use the Kodi voice feature for music a lot so I can just say "Play Metallica" or "Play 1940s Blues" to queue up a long list without having to click all the albums or songs I want to include.

But like I said, it isn't 100% accurate. For example, whenever I ask it to play Garbage it turns on the Bears game.