Voice, the rise of the third platform and why it matters

Last year Samsung marked their entry into the business of AI smart speakers, becoming one of the many smart speaker brands in the market. But what’s interesting about the move is that their speaker comes with Samsung’s own AI personal assistant Bixby. Though Samsung is late to the party, it is making everyone possible move to catch up to the game. In a world where we already have Google Assistant and Alexa widely available along with Cortana from Microsoft and Siri from Apple, why are we getting more voice assistants when hardly people are using it. To understand this, let’s rewind and look back at the time when smartphones were just getting started. Almost every other smartphone manufacturer at that time had their own OS, Nokia had Symbian, Microsoft had Windows, Samsung had Bada. For a majority of smartphone users, it didn’t matter at all what OS does their phone came with as long as their phone looked good, was in their budget, can play multimedia files, click good pictures, etc. Then in 2007, the iPhone was launched, which could do all of those things that any other smartphone in the market could do but even better. 2008 onwards we saw the rise of Android smartphone OS with the same set of features and capabilities. These two mobiles operating systems in the course of 10 yrs time completely took over the market from every leading player. This wasn’t because of a technology-driven push but a technology-enabled pull. They positioned their mobile operating systems as platforms on top of which every brand/business can set up their…