Amazon pioneered the in-home virtual assistant last year with the introduction of the Amazon Echo and its built in virtual assistant, Alexa. If you’re not yet familiar with the Echo check out this great overview video here, but essentially Echo, and the smaller, lower cost Echo Dot, is like taking Siri, Ok Google or Cortana out of the iPhone, Android phone or Windows and putting them into a stand alone device you place in your home that you can control and interact with using your voice.
Once you try the Echo, you realize how transformational this type of always on virtual assistant is, and not just for geeks, but for the mass consumer market. Trust me, I’ve spent a great deal of time and money trying to make streaming music from the web over our home stereo as easy as plopping CD’s into a player and pressing “Play”, but the Echo is the first streaming device my wife picked up instantly and uses frequently. Saying “play Dixie Chicks” is way easier than navigating a touch screen, and is even easier than loading CDs and pressing “play”.
And Amazon has done an amazing job with voice recognition, search, setting timers, controlling home automation and integrating with many music services including Pandora, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeart Radio and TuneIn Radio. Once you start using Echo however the biggest challenge is you want it to do more, like control your TV, read your emails, or add items to shopping lists you already keep in OneNote or Evernote. And therein lies Echo and Amazon’s biggest challenge, other than shopping and some music and video watching, people run the majority of their lives on services other than Amazon’s.
While Amazon is working to develop partnerships and integration with service providers, Google, Apple and Microsoft are going to want to use the existing customer bases they have in their key apps and services to have Siri, Cortana and “Ok Google” become the assistant of choice within peoples homes. All three of these are behind Amazon in terms of having assistants running in peoples homes but we’re still in the very early stages of this market and Googles announcements today of their own virtual assistant appliance, Google Home, their updated Chromecast devices for extending Google Home to TVs, speakers and home stereos and integration with smart home appliances and controllers means the gap will close quickly, and we should fully expect that Apple and (hopefully) Microsoft aren’t too far behind.
For now we’re loving our Echo, and we have two of the recently announced, insanely cheap, Echo Dot 2’s on order to spread the Alexa love around our house, but I’m really considering this kind of v1, throw away technology. As a Prime member I really like the service and services I get from Amazon, but way more of my life is on services other than Amazon’s, and I want my virtual assistant to be an expert at helping me get more usefulness from them.
clarkb... 