Amazon wants Alexa in cars
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. – TNS