Alexa everywhere: how will the domestic assistant market evolve?
As the war to control the domestic assistant market intensifies, Amazon has announced at least eight devices controlled by its voice assistant Alexa, among them amplifiers and loudspeakers, a microwave and a multifunction device for the car. The idea is for Alexa to be anywhere we spend time and to add functionalities that can be controlled by voice, in a fast-maturing market it pioneered, predicted to be worth around $30 billion by 2024.
It’s also a crowded market. Sonos, which recently went public, has established its position thanks to becoming the first domestic sound equipment easily connectable to Amazon Echo and Google Home, and a look at the apps or skills available for each of these domestic assistants reveals a wide range of functions, from irrigation to lighting, air conditioning, security or any number of other applications. Hooking up a microwave to Alexa is not that new: GE has had one for sale for just over a month.
Faced with Amazon’s first efforts with Echo, which secured its position as market leader, Google responded with Google Home, and in the first quarter of 2018 it managed to overtake Amazon’s sales. For the same period, Canalys calculated it had a total of 4.1 million devices in the North American market, with 1.8 million in China (1.1 million are TMall Genie devices from Alibaba) and 730,000 in Korea. Google is expanding faster internationally than Amazon, as well as incorporating new languages. Amazon Echo is available or in advanced tests for six languages and eleven markets: in English in the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Canada and Australia; in French for France; in German for Germany; in Italian for Italy; and in Spanish for Spain and Mexico. Google Home, meanwhile, is already available in eleven languages thanks to the smartphone development carried out for Google Assistant, to reach 30 languages by the end of 2018. In the progressive incorporation of devices into the product line, where Amazon was once ahead, Google is working with different manufacturers to achieve greater diversity, and in some cases with good results. Apple’s assistant, Siri, is available in a much wider variety of languages, but its HomePod is nowhere near as popular as Amazon Echo or Google Home.
The most common uses for domestic voice assistants are relatively incidental, from playing music to listening to the news, turning lights on and off or controlling irrigation or heating. Installing and configuring these types of devices is reasonably simple for people with a certain affinity for technology but still beyond the reach of many, which means that for some devices in the North American market it depends on authorized distributors and installers. Amazon, which sees Alexa as one of the keys to its strategy, wants Alexa to be with us at all times and in all places, offering new possibilities through its developers However, in terms of new features and possibilities, Google has an undoubted advantage: connecting the device with the user’s Google account activates a wide variety of highly personalized functions (calendar, calendar, maps, contacts, etc. .), information that is more difficult to obtain on Amazon.
In short, a market with great potential, showing the most important growth in the entire consumer electronics segment. That said, many people still do not see the value of home assistants and are fearful they could endanger our privacy. It will be interesting to see how things evolve from here.
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