Company / division: Echo/Alexa
Ford becomes the first automaker to bring Amazon Echo into their cars – The Verge (Jan 4, 2017)
This is an important new domain for Amazon and Alexa, one of the first that gets it out of the house with its voice assistant. Of course, it’s also one of the slowest-moving technology products, with massively long upgrade cycles and very long development cycles too.
via Ford becomes the first automaker to bring Amazon Echo into their cars – The Verge
Vivint Smart Home Delivers on the Promise of Artificial Intelligence for the Home – Press Release (Jan 4, 2017)
Vivint is one of the companies that’s closest to my vision for what needs to happen in the smart home, a space that’s currently characterized by lots of disconnected islands and a retail DIY model that’s fine for early adopters but lousy for mainstream users. I wrote about Vivint’s vision a few months back after I was briefed on it, and they’ve now announced the actual product off the back of it. This, and not Amazon’s Echo/Alexa, is what a truly smart home assistant looks like.
via Vivint Smart Home Delivers on the Promise of Artificial Intelligence for the Home – Press Release
Google Assistant is coming to Android TV – The Verge (Jan 4, 2017)
One of the weirdest things about the Google Assistant from the day it launched was that it wasn’t immediately part of Android, but was exclusive to Pixel and Home for at least some period of time (how long exactly has been something of a mystery). We are, now, starting to see signs of the Assistant making its way to some third party devices, notably those cited in this article, but still “in the coming months”. Meanwhile, Alexa is in almost every new voice device announced at CES, highlighting the folly of Google’s strategy to prefer its own devices rather than going straight to an open platform.
via Google Assistant is coming to Android TV – The Verge
Mattel Is Building An Alexa For Kids | Fast Company Design (Jan 3, 2017)
We’ve arrived remarkably quickly at the specialization phase of voice assistant technology – this usually only arrives once the generic version of a technology has gone mainstream. This device looks clever – though the article is frustratingly silent on when or where it might be available – but the broader point is that we’re going to see lots of companies playing in this space, leveraging Microsoft, Amazon and other platforms and technologies combined with their own expertise. Voice is hot, and that means a rapid entry into the market of dozens of new competitors, many of whom won’t survive there long.
via Mattel Is Building An Alexa For Kids | Co.Design | business + design
At CES 2017, Amazon revs Alexa everywhere strategy | ZDNet (Jan 3, 2017)
Amazon has done enormously well with the Echo over the past couple of years, but its biggest challenge remains letting it leave the house. It looks like CES is going to be a showcase of many third party integrations, some of which will make sense and many of which won’t. This is a big success for Amazon, but the big question is still whether it can get Alexa into the most personal and portable of devices: the smartphone. Until that happens, Alexa will be competing with assistants like Siri and Google Assistant which are truly ubiquitous.
via At CES 2017, Amazon revs Alexa everywhere strategy | ZDNet
Amazon Echo and Google Home were smash hits this holiday season: voice developers see major holiday growth | VoiceLabs (Dec 27, 2016)
This data is purely directional, but it confirms what you’d instinctively suspect – that both Amazon Echo and Google Home sold well over the holidays. The gifting phenomenon with these devices suggests a mainstreaming which is new to this space over the past year – Amazon’s massive growth in holiday sales was testament to this too. All the same, it’s obvious that Echo far outsold Home.
Amazon Echo and the Hot Tub Murder — The Information (Dec 27, 2016)
This is one of those nightmare stories that appears to validate lots of people’s concerns about having always-listening devices in the home. As always, the real story is less concerning – Amazon’s Echo doesn’t store everything it hears, just what follows the Alexa prompt. More broadly, however, home automation gear and the data it creates has been used in this case, and will be used in others – a good reminder that if you use services that create and store data, that data may become available to others too, whether hackers or law enforcement.
via Amazon Echo and the Hot Tub Murder — The Information
Voice Is the Next Big Platform, and Alexa Will Own It – Backchannel (Dec 19, 2016)
I disagree with the second statement in this headline, and would want to qualify the first too, but this headline fits perfectly in our Voice and Assistants narrative, which has more analysis on why. Simply put, the insistence that Amazon somehow owns voice because it has an effective voice device in the home is overblown, and voice itself will be only one of many ways we’ll interact with our devices.
via Voice Is the Next Big Platform, and Alexa Will Own It
Wynn Las Vegas to equip 4,748 hotel rooms with Amazon Echo: It’s ‘seamlessly delicious,’ Steve Wynn says – GeekWire (Dec 14, 2016)
I wrote a post once in which I said anything relating to home automation is really tough to market, because you can never really show people how it will work in their own home in a store environment. Hotels may be one exception to that, and this deal with Wynn seems like a fantastic way for Amazon to market Echo and the Alexa functionality among a fairly high-end clientele.