3 Chinese Smart Home Products As Powerful As Amazon Alexa Devices

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Amazon Alexa devices are still among the most popular options for anyone who wants a voice assistant to integrate with their smart home, but they are far from the only game in town. Even if you rule out competing products from other major American tech companies like Apple and Google, there are still several Chinese smart home brands that offer speakers, displays, and hubs with great options for anyone who wants to control lighting or appliances and create other home automations. Many times, these features are just as good as those found in Amazon models.

For anyone who no longer wants to use the Alexa ecosystem, these Chinese options end up being interesting alternatives. Unfortunately, not all products are easy to find in the United States, since some are made primarily for the Chinese public. But international stores are expanding access, and the Matter smart home standard is slowly but surely helping with cross-ecosystem compatibility, making them increasingly more practical for people who live outside China.

Some models also offer a different approach from Alexa for home automation, such as prioritizing local controls or even providing compatibility with several protocols. For these reasons, we're highlighting some options from Chinese brands that you can consider for your smart home instead of Amazon Alexa.

Another interesting Chinese alternative, especially for users who want a dedicated smart home hub, is the Aqara Hub M3. The device comes with support for Zigbee 3.0, Thread, and Matter in a single box, so you get standout compatibility with the devices in your home. The M3 can even integrate with Apple HomeKit, Google Home, or even Alexa itself, if you want cross compatibility.

Unlike similar products from other Chinese manufacturers, the Aqara M3 arrives ready for the American market and does not depend on another country's ecosystem to work well. Because of the protocols it supports, it also works as a Matter controller and Thread border router, which helps enable some local automations without needing an internet connection. For anyone who's looking for clever uses for smart speakers, these functions help a lot.

In terms of price, the Aqara Hub can vary a lot depending on which retailer you're shopping with, but it usually costs around $159 in official stores. If you look at the used market, you can find it a little below that, and promotions also tend to reduce the price. Even with this fluctuation, the value competes well with Amazon's own Echo Hub.

For anyone who wants an alternative that competes directly with the Amazon Echo, there is the Xiaomi Smart Speaker, which comes equipped with Google Assistant instead of Alexa. The model features Chromecast, Bluetooth 5.0, Wi-Fi, and two long-range microphones, while also allowing stereo pairing and multi-room playback. One of the biggest differentiators in this Xiaomi Smart Speaker is the infrared transmitter, which can enable voice control for several products in your home and has a range of up to 32 feet.

This makes it a good option if your home has many older electronics that do not connect to the internet. This function also makes it a smart speaker option for beginners who want an easy smart home upgrade. In addition, the price can vary a lot, but you can find it in the $60 range at some retailers, which is a reasonable price, considering it offers the ability to control products that the Echo Dot cannot.

With an approach focused more on those who want to set up smart home automations, the SwitchBot Hub 2 stands out for its ability to integrate older devices. That is because, like some other Chinese smart home brands, it also has infrared remote capabilities, as well as built-in temperature, humidity, and brightness sensors, making it possible to set the air conditioner to turn on automatically when a room gets warm or colder.

Through infrared, you can control older devices from up to 98 feet away. So, even if your old TV or radio cannot be tapped into via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or an IoT protocol, you can still control it by voice in a more limited way through this feature. Nonetheless, the SwitchBot Hub 2 also supports the Matter protocol, which works with the most popular voice assistants, such as Alexa or Google.

SwitchBot is based in Shenzhen and already sells products in the United States, with good availability through Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart. The Hub 2 costs $69.99 on the brand's official store, a fair price if you consider that it brings together sensors, infrared, and Matter compatibility in a single device, making it cheaper than many competing hubs in the American market.

To build this list of Chinese products that offer compelling alternatives to the different versions of Amazon Alexa, we mainly considered voice assistant functions, device control, and the compatibility of these products with protocols such as Zigbee, Thread, and Matter. Another point was their availability for the American market, particularly sales through local retailers and support for an English interface. A device with strong technical specs does not help much if the user cannot use its functions because of a language barrier.

There are some other Chinese options that are just as good as Amazon Alexa products, like the Xiaodu Smart Speaker and Tmall Genie, which offer some interesting features for their users. But they've never come to the U.S. officially and their apps are only available in Mandarin, making it almost impossible for consumers who don't speak the language to use them. We therefore discarded those options and selected only ones that better support the American market.