Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
When Google released its first Home smart speaker, I was immediately all in. I had been following the smart home scene for years and couldn’t wait to start implementing some of it; the timing was perfect, too, with my husband and me moving into our own apartment and finally free to install, change, and test everything we wanted.
Although I lived in Lebanon and had to pay to ship and import everything to me, while trying to reconcile between the abundance of US-made smart gadgets versus my EU wall plugs and 220-240V electricity, I figured a way around it. It started with a few Wemo smart plugs, a Wink Hub with some Aeotec Z-Wave accessories, a Logitech Harmony remote, and a Canary smart camera — all brands that now feel like a memory from a distant past.
It felt like magic the first time I tried voice commands that turned on my TV or my lights, even more so when I set up my first Christmas routine that played festive music on my Google Home speaker and turned on the tree’s smart plug. Christmas on demand? Sign me up!
With time, though, reality set in, and I started veering away from the “fun” smart home to the more practical one. I tried SmartThings, Blink, Netatmo, Reolink, Wyze, SwitchBot, and a bunch of other brands and products. Eventually, I settled on Somfy smart curtains, a Nuki smart lock, a few Hue bulbs, and a couple of Cielo smart A/C remote controllers. My home was more energy efficient and more comfortable to live in. It was piloted by individual apps, with schedules and rules that made things happen without me pressing a single button, which is what a “smart” home should truly be. But everything fed into Google Home for on-the-spot voice controls, and it felt like a good compromise.
That was 2019 or so. We’re in 2025, and boy, what a difference six years make! I’ve moved countries, bought a new house, and expanded my smart home setup to several dozen items interspersed in a dozen or so apps. I tried to stick with Google Home for the longest time as the one link between it all, but it all inevitably fell apart.
Are you sticking with Google Home or have you moved to another smart home platform? 209 votes Yes, Google Home all the way. I love it. 26 % I'm still with Google, but I'm considering switching. 45 % I use Google Home, but it's not my main smart home platform anymore. 17 % No, I completely left Google Home for another platform (tell us in the comments). 11 %
Voice commands aren’t that smart
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
The more time I spent talking to Google and trying to get it to understand what I want, the more I realized how frustrating and inefficient voice commands are. They require time and planning, the knowledge of a specific command, the patience to wait for the action to be processed, and then the will and inventiveness to try again, a little differently, each time it failed. Plus, everything relied on an Assistant that, oftentimes, didn’t really want to assist me.
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