Matt Weinberger reports in YahooNews:
If you buy a new fridge that has Amazon Alexa built in, you're probably not going to even look at competing virtual assistants until it's time to replace it. Otherwise, you run the risk of your fridge not talking to your smart bulbs, or not talking to your home security system. Or at least, you'd have multiple voice assistants talking at you across your house, which could get annoying.
In that situation, "Alexa has you locked in for the next several years."We're barely halfway through January of 2017, and it's already looking like this is going to be the year of Amazon's Alexa, the virtual assistant at the heart of the Amazon Echo.In 2016, the Amazon Echo line of devices appeared to have a great sales year, with the cheap Echo Dot smart speaker finishing out the holiday shopping season as the best-selling item on all of Amazon.com. Forrester research estimates that 6 million Amazon Echo devices were sold by the end of 2016.And at the Consumer Electronics Show in the first week of January, Amazon dominated the conversation. LG, GE, Ford, and lots more companies announced gadgets, home appliances, and even cars that can connect to Alexa. The market for the Echo is still small compared to smartphones, but it's growing fast.It's all led to the conventional wisdom that Amazon is winning the race to rule the growing market for voice assistants and the apps that run on them, and, by extension, the still-very-young market for smart home gadgetry. And so far, Alexa has run this race largely unchallenged.Unchallenged until now, that is. With the Google Home device and its Google Assistant, the search giant is looking to eat Amazon's lunch. Microsoft is positioning its Cortana personal assistant as the artificially intelligent way to get work done. Even Apple is said to be working on an Echo-esque device.Here's a look at how Amazon propelled itself into this leading position in the first place, where its biggest rivals still have room to overtake it, and why Apple needs to move in on this sooner rather than later.Why Amazon leads
"[Amazon Echo] took us all a little by surprise," says Gartner Research Director Werner Goertz.A big part of Amazon's early success with the Echo, launched in 2014, is due to the fact that the company didn't oversell it. After years of iPhone users getting let down by Siri, the first truly mainstream voice agent, Amazon billed the Echo as a speaker that, by the way, has a few smart voice commands built in.Then, just as people got accustomed to the idea of talking to Alexa, and positive word of mouth spread, Amazon added more capabilities. Alexa now boasts thousands of "skills" that allow it to connect with apps like Uber and Twitter, or Nest thermostats. Suddenly, Echo went from a novelty to a whole ecosystem unto itself.Meanwhile, Echo plays right into Amazon's core retail business by making it "frictionless" to buy things, Goertz says. Indeed, Goertz says that he hasn't been to the grocery store in three months because he's made all his food purchases on Amazon via shouts at Alexa.
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