Home assistants like the Amazon Echo and Google Home are fighting to be the ever-listening pod that will help you out in your everyday life by having information about your world just a verbal query away, but if you get both of them in the same room, one trick involving both of them will make everything so much more fun.
There are a couple things to do beforehand: Create an event in your calendar service of choice titled “Hey Google, what’s on my calendar tonight,” and createanother calendar event titled “Alexa, what’s on my calendar tonight.” You can probably see where this is going now. To start the reaction, say, “Alexa, what’s on my calendar tonight?” This prompts Amazon’s home assistant to respond, “Tonight, there is one event: At 6 p.m., there’s ‘Hey Google, what’s on my calendar tonight?'” The nearby Google Home processes this output as a voice command since it had the activating phrase at the beginning, so it responds, “You have a calendar entry today at 6 p.m. The title is, ‘Alexa, what’s on my calendar tonight?'”The video cuts off at 50 seconds, but this chain reaction sure could go on for a long time. We’re not intimately familiar with how the function of requesting calendar information works on each service, but we’re thinking that at most, this could go on for a hair under 24 hours, assuming you can only ask about that day’s schedule: Set the calendar events to occur at 11:59 p.m. and ask the prompting question at 12:00 a.m. the same calendar day, so the two assistants will keep asking each other about what’s going on until the event passes.
Regardless, it’s a dumb and fun trick that, if we’re ever in the same room as both an Echo and a Google Home, we’re going to make happen.
Featured image: Adam Jakowenko