At the CES show this week a raft of appliance and home electronics makers said they have added Amazon’s voice-controlled virtual assistant, Alexa, to products ranging from TVs to robot vacuums. For non-techies, CES is the annual Las Vegas geek fest where these companies converge to show off their latest and greatest gizmos and features to more than 100,000 attendees.
We don’t know where this is going yet, but it’s clear that Amazon wants to be the hub in your home, and third-parties are buying in. Siri still seems to be the assistant you carry with you, but not the one that controls your surroundings.
Everyone’s different, but for me there’s one big difference in the approach: I feel absolutely comfortable talking to Alexa at home and constantly do – but I usually avoid talking to Siri when I’m in public places, at the gym, etc. For me, a voice assistant is much more valuable at home than on the go (but again, everyone’s different).
The fact that Apple doesn’t have anything like this, not the contretemps over ports on the MacBook Pro, is what worries me about Apple. I’d MUCH rather have an Apple device listening simply because I trust their approach to private information more than Google and likely more than Amazon but I don’t have that option. I was hoping they’d have something for the holidays, but… nope.
Apple absolutely has something like this. But Apple does not like to share their prototypes and experiments with the world. Also what/how Apple wants to do with voice assistants is more ambitious than what Amazon does now. Amazon Echo services are defined by telling the system which sequences of English words make sense to it, and the service needs to try to make sense of it.
Siri services are defined by what they can do for users, how and in what language the user expresses what they want done is Siri’s job to deal with.
It’s like Amazon does command line first and Apple is trying to go straight to a GUI.
My experience exactly – feels natural to speak to Alexa in my kitchen but I never use Siri as it feels stupid when out and about.
The Apple TV was/is this approach. And unfortunately they overpriced it for most folks by including an expensive remote that nobody really likes. I use my Apple TV with the iPhone all the time, the remote went back into the box.
Another approach would have been to add this functionality to WiFi hotspots, especially in combination with meshed hotspots that would make for a perfectly sensible setup (as you distribute these throughout the house anyhow). But Apple decided to let that business die.
If they have a strategy, it is impossible to see it for sure. I simply use my Apple Watch for Siri, but not everybody wants an Apple Watch either. On the other side: let’s not ignore that Alexa does not work at all beyond English for now, and that in many cultures outside of North America an always-on microphone in your private space is nothing many people really want, certainly not from Amazon or Google.
I don’t care what they have in labs. My point is that they’re losing mindshare and the only way coming in late works is if it’s radically better. The iPod was radically better for normals vs other MP3 players (MUCH easier to use). Same for the iPhone. I’d LOVE for the Apple entry to be much better. But I look at the variance between what Siri can do depending on where you invoke her and I worry.
Before the iPod and iPhone, Apple had “no mindshare”, it didn’t matter in the end. Voice assistants are still not mainstream, like MP3 players and smartphones were before Apple started playing.