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It is clear to me that Amazon has doubled down on the only foothold they have, after missing mobile. I think that Voice Assistants will always be a feature, th
by oflannabhra 7y ago
It is clear to me that Amazon has doubled down on the only foothold they have, after missing mobile.
I think that Voice Assistants will always be a feature, though, and not a product. And as a feature, first-party ones will always have an inherent advantage.
Especially with this event, it seems that Amazon is going with a feature and trying to back into products, which to me seems like the opposite way to approach a market.
- webwielder2 7y agoAmazon is under the (mistaken?) assumption that the Echo was popular for any reason besides the fact that it makes playing music super easy.
- wvenable 7y agoI don't think they messed that: https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/25/20882636/amazon-echo-studio-hd-3d-audio-dolby-atmos-sound-listen-hands-on-specs-features-price https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/25/20882636/amazon-echo-stud...
- justapassenger 7y agoI've owned Echo for 4 years (switched to google home now), and used it to play music only once. It's purely assistant to me.
- riantogo 7y agoYou are in the minority. Most of the queries by far are for music use case.
- delecti 7y agoDo you have a source for that claim? Because I also rather rarely play music through mine. Most people I know who have one use it mainly for smart home control.
- jamesponddotco 7y agoYeah, I would love to have some data on that too. We have a few HomePods around the house, and even though that is more of a music player than a smart speaker, we use the voice assistant for everything BUT music. Music is usually controlled with our phones or computers, casted to the HomePods.
- yellowapple 7y agoFor some additional anecdotal data points: - I use mine exclusively for music. - My mom uses hers for a mix of home automation and music, but seems to be heavier toward the latter. Sometimes she'll play Jeopardy with it. - My grandparents use theirs exclusively for home automation.
- blhack 7y agoAnecdote, but: we use our echo all over our house for doing things like setting alarms, and checking the time.
- reaperducer 7y agoSo... it's a clock. Except one that you have to talk to, instead of just looking at it. I have a mantle clock for that. Every 30 minutes a gentle chime drifts through the house, keeping everyone on time. No charging. No shouting. No telemetry. No privacy invasion involved. Best $7 I've spent in a long time.
- scarejunba 7y agoI have one of the Google Home devices in every room in the house. The speakers for the bathroom/bedroom and the video screens for the living room and kitchen. It's amazing. I can tell it to play music synchronized across the house, I have photos of fun stuff scrolling in my living spaces, and I ask it for calendar, transit, and weather advice daily. Plus, it's so far superior to a clock in that I can get in bed and say "Set alarm for 6.30" or "Wake me up in 9 hours" or whatever I want and I can snooze it from bed or stop the alarm without needing to find a button.
- noelsusman 7y agoThese days mine is just a hands free kitchen timer. I don't use it for anything else.
- CodeMage 7y agoWhile I had one, I mostly used it for: 1) playing music that can be named in English (because fuck other languages, right?), 2) setting timers, 3) checking the time. I find voice assistants to be of very limited use to me. Generally, I prefer typing, because it's just faster. When I find myself needing a voice assistant, it's because I'm: 1) not near enough a keyboard, and/or 2) using my hands for something else, namely cooking or driving. Back when I had Echo Dot, it wasn't really useful for cooking, other than setting timers. And, of course, I couldn't take it with me in my car. I don't know if they made it more useful in the last couple of years. I think voice assistants could be extremely useful, but they're being hampered by their creators' ambition. Every single voice assistant I've seen is trying too hard to be "everything you'll ever need", so it could dominate the market. I had hopes for Mycroft II, because it promised to be an open source solution on par with other voice assistants. It turned to be a typical Kickstarter horror story: overpromised and not yet delivered.
- Zenst 7y agoMore case of Voice Assistants are a front-end to services and Amazon sells services, so saturation of that market works best for them. So with mobiles, why not sell services for all those ecosystems and with that target more people across all flavours of mobiles. Win the interface (Voice Assistant) battle and your have a massive advantage in the services that will just work compared to services that take some hacking about. Want to play Amazon music upon alexa - done, want to play Google Play Music using Alexa - let me write some code, setup a service.....effort. Most users want simple, easy, just works and if they can win that battle, then that is a far bigger market than mobiles. Bit like - why focus on selling a form of car when we can sell fuel to all the cars and they want to win that market. Maybe the whole Voice Assistant market may go like the whole VHS/Betamax market did, cheap, works and may be better offerings but market saturations wins in the end.
- devm0de 7y agoAmazon is in constant development of secret projects to throw at the wall and see what sticks. Having worked on their hardware teams they’re constantly reverse engineering products and engineering new potential items that seem kinda out there or anticipating filling a market need that doesn’t yet exist. Swing enough times you’ll get some hits.
- basch 7y agoAlexa is closer to an OS/Shell than a gadget. It's an app store, set of human interface apis and a voice command line to interface with it.