Narrative: Amazon is Ahead in Voice
Each narrative page (like this) has a page describing and evaluating the narrative, followed by all the posts on the site tagged with that narrative. Scroll down beyond the introduction to see the posts.
Amazon to Provide its Echo Mic Array and Related Technology to Select Hardware Partners (Apr 13, 2017)
This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.
Burger King TV Ad Attempts to Trigger Google Assistant in Homes (Apr 12, 2017)
This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.
Google Home is rolling out support for multiple users – The Next Web (Apr 10, 2017)
This shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody – Google actually showed off what appeared to be multi-user support in its demo of Google Home at I/O last year, but then it turned out the finished product didn’t support it when released in the fall. A little while back, rumors began surfacing that it would add the feature soon (and Amazon too), but that hasn’t materialized yet. The screenshot shared here suggests it’s imminent at this point. This is important, because assistants have to be personal if they’re to be really useful, and most people live in homes with other people, whether family members or roommates, and so things like calendar, email, to-do lists aren’t much use to individuals unless they can be recognized and served up different results. That’s not easy to do, especially because these speakers tend to process voices before recognition takes place, which actually makes it harder to recognize the speaker, but the companies were bound to figure it out eventually. If Google does end up launching this before Amazon, this will be yet another performance advantage, even though its distribution disadvantage remains enormous.
via The Next Web
Google Home Vs. Amazon’s Alexa: 54 Questions, 1 Clear Winner – Forbes (Apr 7, 2017)
This is a fun little comparison done by a user in the UK of the ability to the two major home smart speaker units to answer 54 questions. Google Home wins in the end, with 32.5 answered correctly, to 19.5 for Echo/Alexa. The questions were a mix of simple and challenging, and the user was in the UK and asked quite a few UK-specific questions, taking advantage of the fact that both devices recently launched there. But it’s a great illustration of both how Google has the existing skillset to do really well in this category, and also the fact that all these assistants have some way still to go to answer all the questions users might reasonably expect them to deal with.
via Forbes
Google Plots New Hardware to Take on Echo — The Information (Apr 5, 2017)
What do you do if you have two separate hardware products for the home which are selling modestly but not fantastically and have some common elements? You combine them, of course, and so Google is apparently considering a future device which would bring the features of its Home and WiFi devices together in a single unit. That would lower the combined cost and depending on the price potentially also increase the attractiveness relative to either the standalone Home or WiFi devices as they exist today. Given that a single unit of either item today costs $129, it’s entirely feasible that Google could combine the two in a new unit that would still be price competitive with the Amazon Echo while offering a lot more functionality, so this is an interesting angle. But Google Home’s main challenges continue to be less about price and more about name recognition and distribution – the Echo captured the early interest in this space and quickly became the market, heavily leveraging Amazon’s retail distribution channel, while Google continues to struggle to get adoption for its version. Though this move may help spur sales, I don’t think it’s going to lead to the kind of step change Google needs to be a more meaningful competitor.
via The Information
The Samsung Galaxy S8 voice assistant Bixby can’t recognise British accents – Business Insider (Mar 30, 2017)
This is a great example of something I wrote about on Techpinions this week, which is that here in the US we often assume technologies available to us are ubiquitous globally, but that’s actually rarely the case. In this case, it’s the Bixby assistant / interface that ships with the Samsung Galaxy S8 which not only won’t work in languages other than English and Korean but won’t offer voice services at all in the UK, where of course accents are different. (Another tidbit in this piece is that it won’t actually work in US English until May). Building voice interfaces is tough to begin with, but localizing them for different accents and languages is another massive layer of work, often made harder by the fact that voice recognition technologies are trained on single languages like US English.
via Business Insider
Samsung’s new virtual assistant will make using your phone easier – The Verge (Mar 20, 2017)
Samsung has somewhat unexpectedly taken the wraps off its virtual assistant Bixby ahead of next week’s Galaxy S8 launch, where I’d expected it to be the main event from a feature perspective. Based on how Samsung is describing the feature, though, I think it’s merely trying to defuse some hype by downplaying expectations of what Bixby will and won’t be. (The hype was fueled in part by Samsung’s acquisition of Viv, which was a more traditional virtual assistant that Samsung acquired last year, but Bixby appears to be something less.) The description from Samsung is somewhat vague, but I think the approach actually has a lot of merit: every other assistant promises to be just that, implying a broad-based ability to meet needs, which inevitably leads to disappointment and frustration when it falls short, over-promising and under-delivering. Samsung looks like it will come at this from the opposite end, starting small and building up functionality over time, app by app, in a way that the voice interface is able to handle everything the touch interface does in the same app. That, incidentally, should be good for accessibility, something Android devices have always done less well than iPhones. But the big limit there as with Bixby overall is that if third party developers don’t support it, it won’t be very useful, and it the S8 ships with the Google Assistant users may just choose to use that instead. I’m very curious to see next week exactly how Bixby is invoked and how it compares to the more traditional assistant model. Samsung doesn’t have a great reputation in software and services, and I’m skeptical that it will get this right.
via The Verge
Google Home is playing audio ads for Beauty and the Beast – The Verge (Mar 16, 2017)
This feels like an extremely stupid move for Google. Though Google claims this wasn’t an ad, that’s utterly disingenuous, and inserting ads this early in the Google Home lifecycle (if ever) is a huge mistake – this is just the kind of thing that will put people off buying a Google Home, especially because it fits a narrative of Google only being interested in advertising. This is a hardware product, for which users have paid a decent price, and it shouldn’t be playing ads, especially without an opt-out – there is no indication that users would hear ads in any of the marketing material. I just tried my own Google Home to see if it would play this message, but it didn’t, suggesting that Google may have stopped playing the message. If so, good, but it never should have happened in the first place, unless Google wants to kneecap its own product this early in its competition with Amazon’s Echo.
via The Verge
Amazon puts Alexa inside its main iPhone app – VentureBeat (Mar 16, 2017)
Alexa’s single biggest flaw today is that it’s a shut-in: for the most part, it can’t leave the house. That means competing in a broad-based way with Siri and the Google Assistant requires getting onto smartphones, and now we have Amazon putting Alexa into the Amazon shopping app on iOS. Job done? Well, no. Because just having an app on a phone doesn’t mean people will use it. And if it’s buried inside a shopping app, that’s a steep hill to climb relative to just holding down the home button to summon Siri. On the one hand, I get the logic of putting Alexa in the Amazon app – it’s an app many of the company’s most loyal users already have installed and likely use frequently, but it also means it’s going to be several clicks away. I can see some parents with kids using it to keep them quiet with jokes, but it’s hard to imagine people using an Alexa buried in a shopping app as their main assistant while away from home. Integration within the smartphone and its operating system is the key here, which will be impossible on iOS but more feasible on Android, as we’ve already seen with Huawei and Lenovo’s integration plans.
via VentureBeat
Amazon makes it cheaper to host Alexa skills on AWS – ZDNet (Mar 16, 2017)
This is clever tie-in by Amazon of two of its valuable assets: its Alexa skills engine and its AWS cloud infrastructure. It’s offering developers of Alexa voice skills a better deal on hosting through AWS as a way to remove the barriers to developing smarter and more sophisticated skills for its Echo devices (and the small number of third party devices using Alexa). Amazon has touted its number of third party skills repeatedly since launching them as a sign of Echo and Alexa’s capability, but the reality is that many of those skills are very basic, and the model is clumsy to use. If it’s able to attract better skills to the platform, those numbers will start to be more meaningful as signifiers of the platform’s capabilities.
via ZDNet