In voice war, Alexa is No. 1 for now,
Belle of CES ball outflanked Google, Apple, Microsoft
Apple’s Siri has been around five years, but Amazon’s Alexa is the coolest kid on the voice-computing block now.
At least so it seemed at the Consumer Electronics Show this month in Las Vegas, where many manufacturers touted their Alexa functionality as a major selling point for 35 product introductions, including a car, refrigerator, smartphone, robot, Internet router and vacuum cleaner.
“There’s a real hunger for the next big thing,” says Benedict Evans, partner with investment firm Andreessen Horowitz. “It was Web apps, then bots, and now it’s voice interfaces.”
Voice computing eases up on the hands, to use your voice to play music and podcasts, control the smart home, answer questions, and in Amazon’s case, make it easier to buy products.
Alexa is the assistant star of Amazon’s $179 Echo and $39 Dot speakers, products that were sold out at the end of 2016 and are still unavailable. They won’t start shipping again until the end of the month, the e-retailer says.
Did Alexa end up in all those new products at CES — categories you won’t find Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana — because Alexa was so much better at voice? Or was it just brilliant marketing and dumb luck? Maybe for question 1, and a definite yes for No. 2.
“If you want to add a voice assistant to your product, you can try to build it on your own or do a partnership with Amazon, which already has brand recognition,” Evans says.
Apple wasn’t at CES, and Siri is still locked within the iPhone, iPad and Macintosh computers. Cortana is also a Microsoft products exclusive, while rival Google is signing up partners to work with its new Google Home connected speaker, cutting deals with Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai to bring Google Assistant to the car. Its list of partners online is small, especially compared to Amazon, but there’s a good reason.
“Amazon had a year’s head start on Google,” says Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies. The Echo initially was released to the public in 2015. “I spoke to a lot of vendors at CES, and they told me Alexa was the most available AI-based operating system they could hang their shingle to work with.”
Amazon admits the company has been on an ambitious plan to sign up partners to spread Alexa everywhere. “We‘ll never be able to build all the potential devices out there between smart home and wearables, and automobiles,” Amazon Alexa vice president Steve Rabuchin recently told USA TODAY. “We can’t do it alone.”
We asked consumers how they felt about Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google, and our social media lit up.
“Out of the box Alexa could do all these things that Siri couldn’t do,” says Emilia Kubo Kirschenbaum, a tech manager for the Chief ad agency in Washington, D.C.
Kirschenbaum has grown used to hands-free functions like entering her apartment and ordering Alexa to turn on the lights or verbally asking Alexa to turn off the alarm.
Evans says Apple was hurt by first-mover advantage. Siri is clearly stronger and more responsive today than when it launched in 2011, but many remember the initial, poor experience and never came back.
Melissa Hourigan of Denver told us on Facebook that she has Dot, the smaller Echo speaker, for her children, and she loves how they’re hands-free and don’t require a screen. They also eliminate the need to have a phone and pay a monthly service charge.
Kathryn Freeman of Austin likes the variety of third-party apps, called “skills,” for Alexa. She says they’re “much greater than they are for Siri.”
Jim Edds of Pensacola, Fla., likes Alexa for a simple reason: ease of use. The beauty of Echo is you walk into a room, ask Alexa to turn on the lights, “and bam, the lights go on,” he says.
For Thomas Brewster of Virginia, it’s clarity: “She understands my commands. She understands my wife’s commands and my children.”
In the fall, Apple updated Siri by opening the technology to third-party developers, offering the ability to order an Uber and name songs via the Shazam app, but reviews for the upgrade weren’t kind. But don’t count Apple out. Siri still has her fans.
“I think Siri is superior in terms of conversational awareness and question answering,” Michela Paganini, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale, said on Twitter.
Even if Amazon has sold more than 10 million devices, according to analysts, and has ambitions to get the Echo and Dot into every home, Apple has sold more than 1 billion iPhones, and most have Siri on them.
Google Home, released in fall as a $129 Alexa competitor, has its fans, and it’s slowly adding more partners, mostly in the smart home category. “Google Home smokes them both,” says Josh Haftel, a product manager for software giant Adobe.
Amazon clearly exploited a situation that worked out for the company. But whether the products take off is another question. CES is notorious for introducing products that make a splash in January, but lead short, quiet lives after they launch.
“If you want to add a voice assistant to your product, you can try to build it on your own or do a partnership with Amazon, which already has brand recognition.” Benedict Evans, partner with investment firm Andreessen Horowitz