Amazon echo - Google News - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 at 4:35 PM
Amazon Alexa's iOS Expansion (And Beyond)
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As of the last official count offered by
<https://www.pymnts.com/amazon-alexa/2018/alexa-ios-voice-commerce/#disqus_thread>
Amazon<https://www.amazon.com/> in March, Alexa had 30,000 skills. That number
is almost certainly quite a bit higher today, the reality is most of those
skills are likely going unused.
According to recent The New York
Times<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/technology/virtual-assistants-alexa.html>
reporting, Echo users — the consumer group that interacts with Alexa most
frequently — are, by and large, only tapping a thin selection of the AI
assistant’s myriad
skills<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/technology/virtual-assistants-alexa.html>.
Users like their interactions with their voice AIs very much, but recent data
from
Adobe<https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-booming-smart-speaker-market-and-the-services-it-will-help-2018-01-18>,
eMarketer<https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/05/02/almost-20-percent-americans-use-smart-speakers-such-amazon-echo-google-home/573555002/>
and Code<https://www.codecomputerlove.com/blog/lets-talk-voice-assistants>
tells the same story: Customers like using their voice AIs to help them listen
to music, check the weather report and manage their calendar. Other uses are
less common.
There are some regional variations — about 25 percent of Americans report
working with Alexa to complete shopping transactions, whereas less than 10
percent of U.K. consumers report using Alexa for commerce. U.K. voice-assistant
owners, on the other hand, ask an unusually large number of questions about how
to properly boil an egg.
However skilled Alexa is becoming, users are still hesitant when it comes to
leveraging that full skill set. Some experts think that situation is changing,
though. Seven years after most consumers met their first voice-activated AI in
Siri, the marketplace for voice became a competitive place, according to Paul
Erickson, a senior analyst at the research firm IHS Markit, in The Times. That
means the time is here for the market to grow in terms of its offering to
consumer and grow beyond its traditional speaker-based bounds.
“The more interesting functionality is yet to come,” Erickson said. “Part of
that will come as more integration happens this year and next year. This is the
first year we’re going to see real advances with the assistants because of
competition in the marketplace.”
Those advances have been coming apace all year as
Apple<https://www.apple.com/>, Amazon, Samsung<https://www.samsung.com/us/>,
Microsoft<http://www.microsoft.com/> and Google<https://www.google.com/> have
all sought to enhance and expand their voice offerings in the hopes of being
the go-to simulated voice that consumers turn to as they become increasingly
acclimated to the emerging ecosystem. And, in the last seven days, Amazon has
made great leaps forward as it seeks to become that loudest (and most
ubiquitous) voice in a crowded marketplace.
Alexa Finally Makes Her Way To iOS
iPhone users looking for a chance to chat with Alexa from their phone received
some long-awaited, good news yesterday (June 26). Following the
Android<https://www.android.com/> version of the app, Amazon Alexa of iOS now
has voice control.
Look out Siri.
Like the Echo version, Alexa for iOS can control smart home devices, pull up
the user’s desired playlist, answer trivia questions and enable commerce. It
even works in the visual nature of the device it finds itself on: For certain
questions like weather forecasts or movie times, Alexa pulls up supplemental
on-screen materials for its users.
It is almost the entire “hands-free” experience users have come to know and
love on their speaker device, except it’s not quite hands-free, because the
Apple device version of Alexa does not come preprogrammed with wake words.
Saying “hey Alexa” won’t do much of anything. Instead, users will have to open
the Alexa app and manually tap a button to wake Alexa up to get her into
question and answer mode. Siri, of course, can still be woken with a simple
command.
The move is considered a big leap forward, since — unlike Google, Samsung or
Apple — Alexa is the only voice AI with a mobile phone ecosystem to call its
own. And though there have been rumors on and off over the last year that
Amazon is planning to take another stab at the smartphone business, the rather
public flameout of the Fire Phone makes it seem less than likely. Until Amazon
takes another pass at the mobile market (if it does at all), experts agree that
getting its Alexa app onto as many iOS and Android handsets as possible is the
best way to expand that mobile footprint.
If Alexa can prove to be more useful than the oft-complained of
Siri<https://www.cultofmac.com/528391/homepod-may-sound-great-siri-still-sucks/>,
customers might even get over having to tap a button to talk to her.
Alexa As Concierge
Though Amazon’s expansion into the iOS-walled garden has captured a lot of
attention, it was Alexa’s second big expansion into new territory last week.
Amazon announced that it has
partnered<https://www.pymnts.com/amazon/2018/alexa-marriott-hotels-room-service/>
with Marriott International<http://www.marriott.com/> to bring Alexa to the
company’s hotels to serve as the AI concierge travelers probably didn’t know
they needed. The popular voice assistant will help guests with tasks, such as
ordering room service or asking for housekeeping, without the need to pick up
the phone,
Reuters<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-marriott-intnl/amazons-alexa-will-now-butler-at-marriott-hotels-idUSKBN1JF16P>
reported.
The partnership will kick off later this summer at select properties in the
Marriott catalog. According to various anonymous sources, Marriott experimented
with both Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri.
Siri apparently did not make the grade, though Marriott offered no officially
comment on the subject when asked by Reuters. Instead, it answered opaquely
that the hospitality chain has “great relationships with a number of technology
companies and is always open to exploring opportunities to innovate and better
the guest experience.”
As of right now, it seems Alexa is offering the best version of that better
guest experience.
Voice speakers are growing up quickly — a survey by
Voicebot<https://voicebot.ai/>, found that 19.7
percent<https://www.pymnts.com/news/artificial-intelligence/2018/smart-speakers-voice-assistant-ai-amazon-alexa/>
of adults in the U.S. have access to a smart speaker, up from under 1 percent
a mere two years ago. It only took three years for smart speakers to hit close
to nearly 50 million users in the U.S. By comparison, televisions took 13
years, the internet took four and Facebook took two.
For all the explosive growth, users are still wading into all the things voice
can do, with many feelings about their smart speaker and virtual AI, the way
user Justin Hosseininejad reported feeling about his to The Times.
“There’s only certain things I use it for, but I’m happy with it,” he said.
“I’m not doing my taxes with it.”
As Alexa and the other voice AIs start wandering away from the smart speakers,
most still associate them with and into new contexts like hotel rooms, and new
base stations like smartphones and cars. Consumers’ opinions might begin to
evolve, much in the way as recent voice-AI convert and Ohio engineer Stephen
Melik. He told The Times that, though he initially took a pass on smart
speakers, he found interacting with a smart AI on his iPhone and Apple Watch
has been genuinely useful.
“I’ve always viewed these smart speakers as a solution searching for a
problem,” he said. “But the voice assistants … potentially there are a lot of
benefits to it.”
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