Almost every client we meet already talks to a speaker. There is an Echo in the kitchen, a Nest Mini in a bedroom, maybe Siri on every phone. So when we suggest Josh.ai for a whole-home project, the first question is fair: why pay for a voice system when Alexa costs less than dinner?
The short answer is that consumer assistants were designed to be a little useful in every home. Josh was designed to run one home very well. Once a house has real lighting control, motorized shades, multi-room audio, a media room and a dozen thermostats, that difference shows up every single day.
Here is how they compare on the things our clients actually notice.
How you talk to it
Consumer assistants work best when you learn their phrasing. "Alexa, turn off kitchen lights" works. "Alexa, it's too bright in here, and can you start the dinner playlist" usually doesn't, because it is two requests in one sentence and the second half depends on knowing which room "here" is.
Josh is built around exactly that kind of sentence:
- Several actions at once. "Close the shades, dim the lights to half and put the game on" is one request, not three.
- Room awareness. Each Josh microphone knows which room it is in, so "lights off" means this room, not the whole house.
- Plain descriptions. "It's a little warm in here" adjusts the thermostat in that room. "Set the lights to a sunset" picks colors and levels for you.
- Your names for things. We program the system with the names your family actually uses, "the den", "Grandma's room", "the big lamp", rather than whatever a device called itself when it was installed.
With a consumer assistant, the household adapts to the device. With Josh, we adapt the device to the household during programming.
What it can actually control
Alexa and Google are excellent with things sold to consumers: smart plugs, Wi-Fi bulbs, a video doorbell, a streaming speaker. The trouble starts with professional systems. Lutron HomeWorks lighting, motorized shades, distributed audio, a Control4 or Crestron media room and hydronic heating zones often connect through workarounds, if at all, and every workaround is one more thing that breaks after an update.
Josh is designed to sit across those systems. It works with Lutron lighting and shades, runs alongside Control4 and Crestron, and pulls in cameras, locks, garage doors, fireplaces, TVs and streaming services. Instead of one app per system, there is one Josh app, one set of touchscreens and one voice.
That matters most in larger homes. A single sentence can involve three or four systems, and Josh treats it as one request.
Privacy
This is the difference clients bring up most once they understand it.
Consumer assistants are part of much larger businesses, and the companies behind them make money from data and from selling you things. Josh's business is selling and supporting home control systems through professional dealers. In practice, that means:
- Josh does not sell your data or use it for advertising.
- Wake-word detection happens inside the home whenever possible.
- You can review your request history and delete individual commands or all of it.
We have a longer post on Josh and privacy if this is the deciding factor for you, and for a lot of our clients it is.
Hardware that belongs on the wall
An Echo Dot is a puck on a shelf. That is fine in a kitchen and out of place in a finished living room.
Josh's hardware is designed for architecture:
- Josh Nano is a microphone about the size of a coin, set flush into the wall or ceiling. It can be painted to match, and most guests never notice it.
- Josh Micro is a small round microphone for walls or tabletops, in white or black.
- Josh Touchscreen is an 8" or 10" panel that shows the room you are standing in first.
- Josh Edge is a remote with a voice button that controls the whole room, not just the TV.
We plan these locations with the designer or architect, especially on new construction, so the technology disappears instead of collecting on counters.
Who sets it up, and who fixes it
You set up Alexa yourself. That is part of the appeal, and also the problem. When something stops working, you are the help desk.
Josh is only sold through trained dealers. We design the system, install it, program every room and scene, and support it afterwards with remote tools that let us fix most issues without a visit. Software updates arrive over the air, and we adjust scenes as your routines change.
Cost
Josh costs more than a handful of smart speakers, and it is not trying to compete with them on price. You are paying for professional hardware, programming time and ongoing support, and the cost scales with the number of rooms and devices.
The fair comparison is not "Josh vs a $50 speaker". It is "Josh vs the time your household spends working around a consumer assistant that was never designed to run a home like yours."
Can you keep Alexa or Siri?
Yes. Many clients keep a speaker for timers, shopping lists or a child's bedtime story, and use Josh for the house itself. They are not mutually exclusive. What changes is which system you rely on when you want the house to do something.
When Josh makes sense
In our experience Josh is the right call when:
- the home has, or will have, professional lighting, shades or audio
- several people live there and need it to work without learning commands
- privacy matters to the household
- you want voice control that looks like part of the architecture
If your home is a few smart bulbs and a doorbell, a consumer assistant is probably all you need. If it is a whole-home system, Josh is the voice it deserves.
We are a Josh Authorized Silver Dealer serving Greater Boston and MetroWest. See how we design and install it on our Josh.ai page, or book a free consultation and hear it working in a real home.