Google's most ambitious new product isn't its fancy new phone. It's a competitor to Amazon's Alexa. It's called Google Home, coming Nov. 4.
I have on order the upcoming Amazon Dot, which will be delivered Oct. 20. Like the larger and much more expensive Amazon Echo, the Dot is tightly integrated into the Amazon ecosystem. (See here.) The Dot is basically the same thing as the Echo, minus the high quality speaker. The Dot still has Bluetooth and it still has a speaker, but not one designed for music, for example. So you pair or connect it to another good speaker and you get all the audio quality and functionality of an Echo, minus most of the $179 cost. (Like this speaker, for instance, which I've used for several months; it is excellent.)
Google Home will be just as tightly integrated into Google's services such as the calendar, Gmail, maps and so forth.
I have not seen either product's description say this, but when either features accurate voice dictation into MS Word, Google Docs or any open app on my computer, that will be decisive for me. Right now when I want to use speech to text, I use my Android smart phone, which transcribes extremely well. But it is not suitable for more than a paragraph or two.
I know that Windows 10 offers voice to text, but it's fairly rudimentary, and software such as Dragon seem to me to be not capable enough to justify the price.
So what about Chromebooks? One report this week said that Chromebooks. operating basically on an amped-up version of Android called Chrome OS, are outselling PC notebooks this year among college students. Well, Chromebooks have speech to text built in. Might have to take a look at one.
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