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Sunday, September 29, 2019

Alexa Still Competing Best in the Home

Agree, have just been taking it into the car with Echo Auto.  Of course its still competing versus the smart phone screen.   In fact all connections with Echo devices are enabled and formulated from a smartphone App.   True you get higher audio and sometimes video from echo devices,  but not necessarily intelligence.   Siri and Android solutions can still be 'closer' to you because they are embedded in the hardware itself.   And hardware AI is starting to show its value for some kinds of AI problems.   The idea of very good 'ambient computing'  listening and engaging and conversing, may also be best closer to the hardware.   Good related thoughts below:

Alexa’s real competition is still your phone screen
Amazon is still better inside the home than outside
By Dieter Bohn in TheVerge

One of the big themes we’ve been tracking for a few years now is Amazon’s various attempts to make Alexa useful outside your home. Amazon has a very good value proposition for customers inside their houses: Echo speakers are great for music, timers and such in the kitchen, and smarthome controls.

Amazon clearly has ambitions to make Alexa the leading platform for ambient computing. But to do that, it needs more ubiquity than it can achieve right now. That’s one reason that Amazon was so excited to announce a partnership with GM to make Alexa available on those cars. It’s also one reason I was surprised to see the company didn’t announce any updates to the Echo Auto.

But the most obvious way to do that is to be the default assistant on phones. Amazon is probably never going to get there, because Apple won’t allow it, for one thing. On Android you can switch our your default assistant from Google to Alexa, but the number of customers who realize that’s possible is small and the number who are likely to do it is even smaller.  ... " 

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