The Santa Tracker is one of the most awaited features from Christmas-addicted digital natives, and this year brings even more goodies as announced earlier this month. One of the new things that they’re adding is to integrate the holiday-themed program and app with Google Assistant, the update version of Google Now, Now on Tap and Google’s voice assistant, all rolled into one. You will now be able to find out where Santa is, among other things, just by simply asking Google Assistant.
If you have Google Home or a Pixel device, then Google Assistant is probably your new best friend. Those who have Allo can also enjoy it as a chatbot but not the full version. But if you have the whole Google Assistant, then you can just ask “Where’s Santa” and it will update you. But probably most of the fun things will happen on Christmas Eve when Santa is supposedly flying around the world. Whether or not you actually believe there is a Santa, the tracker is an annual source of fun for most people.
For now, you can enjoy asking Google Assistant to tell you some holiday-themed jokes. We can’t assure you that they will not be corny, but if you go for those sort of things, then go crazy. For those who celebrate Hanukkah, Google also has something special for you. You can play a simple spin the dreidel, virtual style. It’s like the virtual coin toss except that you spin it and you have four sides (Nun, Gimel, Hey, or Shin). It will even explain to you the rules, just in case you’ve kind of forgotten what the results mean to the game.
Again, you will be able to enjoy Google Assistant on your Google Home and Pixel devices. No word yet on when the rest of the Android world will be able to benefit from it.
SOURCE: Life Hacker
tl; dr
Basically the Echo you use commands where you talk to the Google Home naturally. The Echo will handle some fuzziness but fundamentally they are variations to commands instead of fundamentally understanding what you are saying.
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We have found the Home to handle majority of our use cases better than the Echo. With the exception ordering stuff.
So Thompson put up 60 points. “hey google what is the most kobe scored in a game”? Echo can not do this. Watching a rally and all the people have an acronym on their shirt. “hey google what does X mean” and Google answers.
But it is the inference with music that is where Home really shines. There are times with the Echo you have to do a quick google search but with the Home you can fine what you are looking for with very little and there are situations where the Google Inference is better than a human.
So say “hey google play gwen sting bottle” and Sting and Gwen Stefani starts playing.
The last big difference is the Chromecast as output. This is a big thing for us. So wife says “hey google play SNL highlights on TV and the TV turns on, input set and SNL highlights from YouTube start playing.
Only config by me was renaming the Shield to TV.