It is exceptionally good at hearing people. I tested with our HomePod and our Amazon Echo next to each other and the HomePod outperformed the Echo any time there was outside noise or any time the device itself was playing music. The fact that the Echo can't seem to hear people talking over itself seems like a big issue. The HomePod has to use some kind of audio cancellation that subtracts anything it's playing because it was able to hear me from a room away at normal speaking volume at 80%+ playback volume.
I briefly had an Echo, and one thing my friends and I found funny was to have it play some annoying song, and then call out "Alexa, volume 10" because once it got that loud, the only way to make it stop was to go over and manually adjust the volume, as it couldn't hear anyone trying to turn it down.
