Alexa at CES: Where Is Voice Going?
The annual tech frenzy that is the Consumer Electronics Show wrapped up at the beginning of January in Las Vegas, and amid the huge array of new consumer tech on offer, Amazon’s Alexa has been hailed as the ultimate winner of the show.
Despite not having an official presence at the show themselves, Amazon’s Alexa personal assistant was babbling away to convention-goers through more than 40 products (more than even Amazon themselves were expecting); from Echo clones to fridges, cars, watches, and robot hoovers. Here’s a look at some of the more interesting new applications of Alexa.
Attack of the Clones
Lenovo launched the Lenovo Smart Assistant, a smart speaker housing Alexa. The Smart Assistant was the most notable Echo clone at CES, and we expect to see this market grow in size over the coming years. While it may seem odd that Amazon is happy to have competing products launch into the market, it’s important to remember that Echo isn’t really the product Amazon is selling; it’s just the launch platform to bring Alexa to the world, and Alexa is what Amazon is banking on. Offering Alexa to device manufacturers like Lenovo allows these manufacturers to hop into the voice market faster, offering consumers a wider range of choices, and increasing the speed of Alexa’s uptake in households.
Beyond the Speaker
On the topic of a wider choice of designs, GE showed C by GE; a futuristic, stylish lamp with a built-in Alexa assistant. While smart speakers turned out to be the beachhead for voice in the home, not everyone wants or needs a speaker in their living room. Offering Alexa in a broader range of common household electronics makes sense — sure, chatting with your lamps may seem a bit odd, but what new technology isn’t a bit odd to begin with?
Multi-Assistant Devices
Mattel’s new Aristotle smart speaker and camera houses two assistants; Alexa, invoked with its usual wakeword, and a second assistant invoked with the word ‘Aristotle’. This second assistant, powered by Microsoft’s Cortana technology, is custom to Mattel and kid-friendly. It can play games with children, answer their questions, soothe them when they cry and sing lullabies. This has its own pros and cons, but what’s interesting is the dual personalities housed in the device, each catering to different audiences and having different capabilities. With both Amazon and Microsoft apparently ok with rooming together, voice’s platform wars may be less intense than those witnessed in the phone, desktop, and games console markets.
Voice Hits The Road
Cars have some of of the most practical applications of voice control, and it’s one industry area where voice control is already prevalent — whether for sat nav, controlling entertainment, or handsfree calls. The teamup between Ford and Amazon looks to take voice control in the automotive industry one step further by allowing users to feed destinations into their car navigation systems, control their smart homes from the driving seat, and being able to lock, unlock, start, and check info on their cars from inside the house. Granted a lot of these features are ‘coming soon’ but it’s a healthy start and should see Alexa begin to close the gap on Apple’s CarPlay, Nuance’s Dragon Drive, and good old smartphones strapped to the dashboard.
Other automakers also announced voice integrations including Cortana (Nissan and BMW) and Google’s Assistant (Hyundai and Daimler).
Taking on Television
Given that Amazon’s ambitions are for Alexa to be the centre of your smart home, the lack of control over screens is conspicuous in its absence. Yes, Amazon’s Fire TV devices have Alexa built into them, but Echos and Fire TVs can’t talk to each other, and Fire TV lacks the always-listening abilities of Echo. Compared with Google Home, which can command a TV via Chromecast or Android TV, Echo’s media credentials are lacking a significant component.
This is why Dish’s Hopper device is a welcome change. It doesn’t actually have Alexa built in, but can be controlled by it via a new Skill. Although it won’t be much use to us in the UK, (Dish doesn’t operate here) it’s an encouraging move towards getting Alexa to control the main screen in our living rooms. Wouldn’t it be great to bark out ‘Alexa, play Brooklyn 99 on Netflix’ without having to find the remote?.
It should be noted that three television manufacturers did launch screens with Alexa, but all require Amazon’s voice remote to actually work, thus falling victim to the same shortcomings of Fire TV.
Another LG Smart Fridge
LG have been trying to convince us we need a smart fridge for 17 years, and while the Smart InstaView is easy to write off as just yet another attempt by the company, it is worth taking a second look at. 51% of Echo owners put them in their kitchens, so baking Alexa into kitchen appliances does make sense, and the fridge is one of the more sensible ones to host the assistant. While we doubt it will cause people to rush to replace their fridges, it does show that Alexa has a place beyond typical living room devices.
A Foray Back Into Phones
Amazon’s own foray into smartphones was an infamous disaster, but Alexa has found her way back to the market in the shape of the Mate 9, from Huawei. Given that Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Samsung have all had voice assistants built into their phones for years and struggled to find a convincing use outside of the car, it’s unlikely Huawei’s move will be any different. However, it may take a while before everyone has voice built natively into their cars, and Alexa on mobile offers a stopgap solution to that market. If anything, it demonstrates the industry’s thirst for voice tech, with Amazon the only trough to drink from.
The Competition
Although it hogged the spotlight, Alexa wasn’t the only assistant on stage at CES. Google’s Assistant popped up in Nvidia’s Shield entertainment streaming device, which was coupled with the unveiling of Spot, an Echo Dot-like satellite device extending Shield’s listening abilities beyond the living room. This signifies the (so far) slow expansion of the Google Assistant beyond Google-made devices, but it’s a drop in the tide of Alexa gadgets on show, and Nvidia’s weight in this sector is concentrated in niches. Although the Shield/Assistant combination is less capable than Dish’s Alexa skill (which has access to much more data), Nvidia did show off previously unseen abilities of the Assistant, such as back-and-forth conversation which didn’t require constant ‘OK Google’ invocations (a canny reminder that Google’s software still has a technological edge on Alexa.)
Taking Stock of the Market
CES has shown that companies and people are finding more and more applications for voice. Some will be dead ends; others will lead to useful, practical applications. As for the shortcomings of the voice assistants, on the 10th anniversary of the launch of the iPhone, it’s useful to look back at what the first iPhone was like: no app store, no front-facing camera, no control centre or notifications, no GPS. Yet today we consider smartphones like the iPhone a huge asset to people’s lives, so it’s always healthy to have some patience with this new market.
When Google launched Google Home, there were instant comparisons and tales of heating competition. Would Google’s superior technology and experience trump Alexa? CES has thrown the market positions of the two companies into sharp light — Amazon is very much king of the market for now. Of course this can change — despite our familiarity with Amazon it is not a truly global company (it has no presence in Scandinavia, Middle East, Africa), and lacks the volumes of language experience Google has — but the sheer numbers of Echos in homes (an estimated 14 million), the breadth of device makers onboarding Alexa, and the unclear path to monetisation for Google is keeping Amazon at the forefront of the market.
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