Amazon wants Alexa in cars
Online retail giant Amazon is making a push to get its Alexa voice assistant into your car, writes Jefferson Graham.
The floor of the sprawling Los Angeles Auto Show is filled with fancy vehicles showing off their ultra-flashy, state-ofthe-art infotainment systems, with giant screens that drivers really shouldn’t be looking at while driving.
(But come on, you know they do.) Inside the car, ‘‘it makes more sense to use voice,’’ says Ned Curic, the vice-president of Amazon’s Alexa Auto division. ‘‘You want to keep your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, so using your voice makes more sense.’’
To that end, Amazon is looking to bring the Alexa personal assistant to cars to help drivers with important tools, such as mapping and music navigation, and to help find the nearest petrol station.
Curic was at the Auto Show last month to make a pitch to automakers and third-party vendors.
He’s not alone. Apple, via its CarPlay system, and Google, with Android Auto, have been targeting the lucrative car market for several years, with the features available as part of step-up packages at the time of car purchases or as stand-alone accessories on sale at auto and electronics shops.
Amazon will have its own, nonvisual device for the car, Echo Auto, available next year. It currently sells for US$24.99 (NZ$36.20) as a pre-order now, but will be bumped up to US$49.99 when it launches.
At his presentation, Curic showed slides of car hacks Amazon discovered online, where car owners brought the entry level, compact Echo Dot speaker into the car, hooked it up to the cigarette lighter for power, used the internet signal from their smartphones and got Alexa playing music and offering information.
‘‘We realised there was something there,’’ he said, and got to work on its own device.
The end goal is to have manufacturers embed Alexa into the dash entertainment, so that it’s totally seamless, he said.
‘‘Connected to a smartphone is one way,’’ he says. ‘‘Our future is all about having Alexa embedded directly into the car, so you don’t have to buy a device. It’s there, it’s integrated, you don’t have to do much, just engage with Alexa.’’
Audi has a new electric car for 2019, the e-tron, that will do just that, and BMW will add Alexa functionality to all BMWs produced from March 2018 onwards, beginning next year.
Curic hopes to make more announcements in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research, says Amazon is in for a challenge getting to automakers, since Apple and Google have been at it for so long, and bring something to the table – smartphone devices they make that can be easily connected to the car’s entertainment systems.
‘‘Amazon doesn’t have that,’’ he says.
The bigger question, he says, is which personal assistant consumers would want to live with in the car – Siri, Google Assistant or Alexa.
While Apple says Siri is the most used personal assistant, producing more than 1 billion daily queries, ‘‘Alexa blows Siri away in terms of minutes spent,’’ he says. ‘‘Fewer people use Alexa, but they spend more time with it.’’
Then there is the fact that the automakers are currently pushing back against the invasion of thirdparties like Amazon into their ecosystems by integrating their own intelligent voice assistants into their cars, as seen in the latest models from both BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
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