Roku Appears to be Building Voice Assistant Capabilities, Doubles IPO Target (Sep 18, 2017)
Variety’s Janko Roettgers has been putting two and two together in the form of various job postings and LinkedIn profiles and posits that they add up to Roku working on a smart voice speaker, likely to work alongside either its own hardware or its platform partners’ TVs. The context, of course, is both Apple and Amazon offering voice interfaces for their TV boxes, while Roku’s own efforts are fairly thin in this area. Janko suggests Roku might be working on a companion device which could be sold as an accessory to TVs, but the functionality could presumably also be built into Roku’s own TV boxes in future. Voice control of TVs is starting to become a bigger deal, with not only Amazon and Apple’s direct efforts, but Chromecast integration with Google Home, and third party partnerships like DISH’s integration with Alexa, which is supposed to be very good. Comcast, too, offers pretty decent voice features on its X1 set top box platform. So, even though Roku’s focus going forward is less on hardware and more on its platform, it realizes it needs to build certain hardware features if it’s to remain competitive. I would argue, though, that this doesn’t require Roku to build its own voice assistant, and it would probably get to market faster with a better product by building on top of Alexa, although of course that means ceding some control to one of its biggest competitors. Alexa is, at least familiar to many users, whereas Roku would be starting essentially from scratch, with no potential at all for creating an assistant people could use outside their living rooms.
In related news today, Roku has raised its IPO target, now planning to raise $252 million, up considerably from the first figures it released with its S-1 filing.
via Variety
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