The Google Assistant was the big news from the company’s I/O conference earlier this year, but it took months for Google’s true Siri competitor to really arrive. First it was baked into the largely unnecessary Allo chat app, and then it showed up as a flagship feature on the new Pixel phones. Now Google Home is shipping, putting the Assistant a voice command away even when your phone is in your pocket.

Its inspiration is obvious, the $129 Home directly takes on the Amazon Echo. Indeed, many of the features here are the same. But Google is betting that the vast amount of data it stores, combined with the vast amount of data it knows about its customers, can make for a more useful product. It’s a reasonable notion, but Home isn’t quite ready to deliver on the promise of “your own personal Google” just yet.

Google Home is a great way to show off just how smart Google is, but it doesn’t feel like an essential experience yet. That’s mainly because it lags behind the Echo in terms of support for third-party services. That makes Echo a smarter buy if you want to control smart home devices, but Home is a perfectly viable option for those who use lots of Google services.