Topic: Assistants
Volkswagen will be integrating Amazon’s Alexa into its cars – The Verge (Jan 8, 2017)
This is the second of two Alexa car announcements made at this year’s CES, along with Ford’s, and together they’re part of Amazon’s push to get Alexa out of the home. There’s no date yet for this one, so it’ll be a while still before we start to see this, and of course unless you’re buying a new Ford or VW in the near future, you won’t benefit, but this is part of the longer-term push.
via Volkswagen will be integrating Amazon’s Alexa into its cars – The Verge
Alexa, when will you work well outside the home? – The Verge (Jan 6, 2017)
This piece highlights what I still see as the biggest challenge for Alexa – for the most part, it’s not available outside the home, and where it is the experience is sub-par relative to the Echo. That’s really important because I think a lot of people are mistaking Echo’s superior performance as evidence of better voice recognition or natural language processing rather than a function of its form factor. Put it in a smartphone or watch, and it will likely perform just as poorly as other assistants in those devices.
via Alexa, when will you work well outside the home? – The Verge
Huawei’s Mate 9 will be the first phone with Alexa preinstalled – The Verge (Jan 5, 2017)
I’ve been saying for months now that where Alexa really needs to make progress is in phones, because unless an assistant is with you all the time, it’s not truly useful. Well, here’s the first phone with Alexa, and it’s an Android one, as you’d expect, though the announcement here feels a little half baked. The news leaked due to a prematurely unfurled banner at CES, and even now it’s out there some of the details are unclear. But this is a blow to Google and yet another CES win for Amazon.
via Huawei’s Mate 9 will be the first phone with Alexa preinstalled – The Verge
Baidu’s ‘Little Fish’ home robot could be China’s Echo – The Verge (Jan 5, 2017)
If you live in the US, it’s easy to forget that it’s one of only three countries where Echo is available, along with the UK and Germany. For all the many integrations Alexa is seeing this week at CES, there are many markets Amazon isn’t addressing directly, and China is the biggest. There will therefore be opportunities for other players in the same space in other countries, and Baidu is an obvious candidate in its domestic market.
via Baidu’s ‘Little Fish’ home robot could be China’s Echo – The Verge
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
LG at CES 2017: Here’s everything you need to know – CNET (Jan 4, 2017)
LG’s press conference at CES was the usual mishmash of many different things, but if there were two themes, they were robots and voice, with Alexa providing the guts of the voice capability. It also talked up its emergent AI capabilities, highlighting the fact that OEMs are making their own investments here rather than relying on AI from their platform vendors. Lots of this stuff feels more concept than mainstream at this point, but it’s further validation for what’s rapidly becoming the dominance of voice platforms by Amazon’s Alexa.
via LG at CES 2017: Here’s everything you need to know
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
Hyundai Collaborates With Google Assistant In Further Connecting Homes To Cars – Hyundai (Jan 3, 2017)
This integration allows a Google Assistant user to remotely control their Hyundai through its Blue Link connected car system. We’re going to see more and more integrations between various voice assistants and cars, though of course Siri won’t be part of that yet because its third party integrations are limited to a handful of specific categories. Google is slowing ramping up its API efforts around the Assistant, which should add value in interesting ways.
via Hyundai Collaborates With Google Assistant In Further Connecting Homes To Cars – Hyundai
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.