Post 291 — Amazon Fulfilling Smart Home Dream With Ring Buy, Alexa Growth
291-Artificial Intelligence-21–43159
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The concept of a smart home has been in the works for more than 30 years and while Amazon(AMZN) may have finally nailed it with its home assistant Alexa, it’s now adding to that with its latest acquisition of Ring.
On Tuesday, Amazon purchased Ring, the maker of a smart doorbell that streams audio and visual to smartphones, for a price reportedly above $1 billion. With Ring and a series of smaller acquisitions and organic initiatives, Amazon is building on its smart home product footprint in a race to be the market and mind share leader among consumers.
“We believe Ring will be tightly integrated with Alexa/Echo as part of Amazon’s beachhead strategy with the smart speaker market, which is showing major signs of success this year, coming off a banner holiday season,” GBH Insights analyst Daniel Ives said in a research note to clients Wednesday.
Video doorbells, smart thermostats and smoke detectors, lights and other devices that connect to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi can now be controlled by voice and smart speakers. Home security is also a priority with these devices. The Amazon Echo line of smart speakers, voiced by Alexa, the smart-talking speaker that connects to a growing number of in-home devices, have a big lead over Alphabet (GOOGL) and Apple (AAPL) in this market.
The main competitor to the Amazon Echo is the Google Home device by Alphabet. It was introduced in November 2016, two years after the arrival of Echo. Alphabet has since expanded the lineup with various next-generation devices, as has Amazon. In December, Amazon bought Blink, a maker of smart doorbell and porch cameras, adding to Amazon’s line of connected home products that includes Echo smart speakers and Fire TV streaming devices.
Apple was late to the market with its Apple HomePod. Apple announced the HomePod in Junebut missed the holiday shopping period.
These and other smart speaker devices from other manufacturers are supported with artificial intelligence and are emerging as the central hub of the smart home. The smart home ecosystem represents a $20 billion market opportunity over the next three years with Alexa front and center, Ives wrote.
Alphabet, in addition to Google Home, has Nest, acquired in 2014 for $3.2 billion. Nest makes a line of smart thermostats, security cameras and smoke detectors.
“Amazon’s purchase of Ring helps to equalize the automation push currently underway by Google Home and Nest,” wrote Baird analyst Colin Sebastian, in a research note to clients. “As Amazon moves more aggressively into the grocery delivery space, we believe smart security devices will be an important factor in driving user adoption.”
The acquisition of Ring arrives four months after Amazon unveiled an in-home delivery system, Amazon Key, which allows delivery people to let themselves into your home to drop off packages.
Amazon’s acquisition of Ring hit the shares of ADT (ADT), the home-security company. Shares of ADT were down 7%, near 10.80, during afternoon trading on the stock market today. ADT provides residential and small business electronic security, fire protection, and other related alarm monitoring services.
Amazon shares were up marginally to close at 1,512.45. Alphabet shares were down 1.2% to 1,103.92. Apple shares ended the regular trading session down 0.2% to 178.12.
#A.I. #Alexa #Amazon #ChatBot #SpeechRecognition #SmartHome #IoT
