source: google

Ecommerce bias

Calvin Ling
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

By nature, a voice assistant is personal. It gets even more personal when it becomes a permanent fixture in your house or apartment. A device is always listening to you (though only recording after you say the wake word). Privacy experts will tell you this is a major concern.

I’m not upset by this. In fact, I welcome it: currently, my house has a few Amazon Echo Dots, a Google Home, an Amazon Echo. An Amazon Echo Show just left us. We’re fully wired up, which means we’re one voice command away from reordering toilet paper. Yay tech.

After using an Echo Dot and a Google Home side-by-side for a few weeks now, I find myself only using the Google Home to control my lights and devices. On occasion, I’ll set an alarm using the Google Home. I’ll often ask the Google Home about the weather as I’m putting on clothes for the day.

These devices are effectively equal, and yet I find myself always using the Google Home.

The biggest differentiator is what I call an ecommerce bias. At the end of the day, the purpose of the Amazon Echo is to make shopping easier. By using your voice, you can easily reorder items. Or, if you’re a risk-taker, you can buy items you’ve never purchased before. Bottom line: it’s made to help you buy things from Amazon. In contrast, the Google Home is just another Google product, meaning the purpose is to have you send more data to Google — regardless of whether it’s shopping-related or otherwise. Google just wants your data to make its search better, which means you likely benefit in the short-term from improved voice recognition and better speech-to-text functionality.

And that’s why I’ll always turn to the Google Home first. Having already overcome the first step of welcoming a device into my home, I now lean towards the device that a) won’t intrude my mental or physical space with ecommerce, and b) has the best voice recognition. If the Google Home had ads, then it’d be a different story, but for now, the Google Home remains a device with no alter-ego. God knows I already buy too much stuff.

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