Amazon Goes Nuclear in the Voice Wars
With a barrage of new Alexa-powered devices, including an oven (convection and microwave), a slew of new Echo speakers and Show screens, a glowing orb, and its first wearables, Amazon just (massively) escalated the voice wars. This could well be an e-commerce tipping point on par with Amazon adding 3rd party merchants in Web 1.0 — only time will tell. Regardless, it’s a big deal for any business that sells to consumers.
Alexa now gets body-mounts via earbuds, along with two “Day 1 Edition” (running Google’s playbook, Day 1s are not-quite-fully-baked and only available by invitation) wearables: a titanium ring called Loop, and plain, black-framed spectacles called Frames. Some articles call Frames smart-glasses, a term for wearable augmented reality displays. But Frames have nothing to do with AR, or with vision at all — they’re just frames. Shipped with inert lenses (which can be replaced with prescription), their purpose is giving Amazon space on the face for directional microphones.
Amazon can’t (as far as we know) tap your cell mic to surveil you (unlike the FBI), so Alexa needs consent, plus coverage…….lots of coverage. The sort you can only get with microphones everywhere. Which Amazon is getting, because the sake of convenience, Amazon customers have invited to bugs their homes. Taking full advantage of this trust, the initial Echo beachhead has expanded from kitchen counters and nightstands to cars, TV remotes, electrical outlets, doorbells, wall cameras, and assorted smart screens — Amazon also anticipates that people will wear a wire, in the form of Echos on fingers and faces.
Thanks to Alexa, buying from Amazon no longer requires a browser — or even a phone or computer. CEO Satya Nadella once boasted that Microsoft’s Cortana voice assistant would kill web browsers, but Alexa beat her to it through her proliferating Echos. Amazon is perfectly suited to bugging the world by planting simple, cheap, and cheerful devices like $29 Echo’s everywhere. Microsoft, not so much. While Nadella is credited with revamping Microsoft’s culture, its business is still built on complexity and constantly accretive costs. Unable to beat Alexa, Microsoft joined her — Alexa uses Bing, and, when requested, will invoke Cortana. Nadella now says: “You should also be able to use [Cortana] on Google Assistant….You should be able to use it on Alexa, just like you use our apps on Android or iOS. So that’s at least how we want to go.” Whether that happens remains to seen.
While you can ask Alexa to access Cortana, she still tends a walled garden. Same with Siri and Google Assistant, which likewise limit the breadth of 3rd party voice applications. Google Assistant, for example, can interface to other natural language understanding models, but only via Google’s speech recognition. Access to audio media, which would allow more advanced AI, is verboten. Plus, both Amazon and Apple lock down access to many hardware functions like alarm clock and geolocation.
Restrictive voice ecosystems are part of the FTC, DOJ and state AG’s investigations into Big Tech business practices, morphing restricted voice access from a technical matter to a legal one. Ironically, blocked access to voice is the issue that ended up putting the first chink in the Bell System’s monopolistic armor, leading to the eventual AT&T breakup which ultimately the internet that Amazon now dominates. The seminal case wasn’t about an electronic device, but simply about allowing phone users to speak into a 3rd party piece of plastic. ¹
The Hush-A-Phone improved privacy by replacing cupped hands, attaching to standard “candlestick” phones, which violated the Bell System terms of service which typically specified:
“no equipment, apparatus or lines not furnished by the Telephone Company shall be attached to, or used in connection therewith.”
While 25 years of Hush-A-Phone sales totaled up to a rounding error in the Bell System customer base (about .12 % of the phones in service), AT&T still opted to aggressively enforce its no 3rd party terms explicitly against Hush-A-Phone:
“upon discovering the use of a Hush-A-Phone, [the Bell System Policy] is to inform the subscriber that use of the device is contrary to their tariff regulations and to request him to remove it. . . . If the customer does not agree to disconnect the device, he may be informed that the company may discontinue his service.”
In 1948, in a bid for relief, Hush-A-Phone — joined by its channel partners and some customers — filed a FCC complaint for declaratory judgment.
Then, as now, the FCC was especially sympathetic to AT&T’s needs and wants, so after taking a year to consider the complaint, it issued an Initial Decision in AT&T’s favor. Subsequently, the FCC let the matter drag on for five years (while AT&T’s foot was firmly planted on Hush-A-Phone’s throat), before affirming AT&T’s unchallenged dominion over all things telephone. If not for an intervention by three D.C. Circuit Court judges, Hush-A-Phone would have succumbed, and we might well be living in an alternative reality still tethered to wired handsets rented from AT&T, with no Amazon, no Alexa, no Netflix — no Internet at all.
Back in our reality, AT&T — after breaking up and reconstituting — is still around, but now Amazon is the behemoth that regulators are focused on.
With its slew of new Echos, Amazon’s Alexa ecosystem is now robust enough to reduce a mobile phone to accessory status. Were one so inclined, the price of an iPhone will buy a house full of Echos: Show screens, assorted Echos, a Ring doorbell, accessory cameras, and Flex smart-plugs (with microphone). The Echo Auto and Loop ring require mobile connectivity — but just a cell radio and basic screen — so with Alexa, a smartphone needn’t be very smart at all.
The emerging ramifications of voice extend past Big Tech and Big Telco, because digital assistants (DAs) are becoming gatekeepers to the web. Unlike a human secretary, you can’t bypass Alexa by calling after business hours, or schmooze her with chocolates. And unlike web browsers, Alexa filters results — invisibly. Accordingly, voice assistants create an entirely different sort of filter bubble, that, at this point, appears only semipermeable. Which means that every business will need a voice/DA strategy (in addition to Alexa, at least for Siri and Google as well) to burst through those bubbles — or harden them in its favor. Or, perhaps, to field a custom assistant whose loyalties are known and assured, as BMW has.
