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HOME ASSISTANTS
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Enrique Dans is Professor of Innovation at IE Business School
in Madrid (Spain), and Senior Advisor for Innovation and
Digital Transformation at IE University. He received his Ph.D.
from the Anderson School at UCLA, an MBA from Instituto
de Empresa (Madrid, Spain), a B.Sc. from Universidade
de Santiago de Compostela, and conducted postdoctoral
studies at Harvard Business School. His research interests
are related to the impact of disruptive technologies at three
levels of analysis: individuals, organizations and the society as
a whole. Professor Dans has been teaching and consulting in
the technology field since 1990, is a frequent contributor and
columnist in business and economic newspapers and magazines,
participates in several technology startups and has written on
a daily basis since 2003 in his page, www.enriquedans.com
HOME ASSISTANTS, virtual assistants or smart speakers is an
increasingly competitive market, one largely created by Amazon
Echo, launched in November 2014 and currently the absolute
leader in sales and market penetration, but one into which
Google Home entered in November 2016, and Apple HomePod,
unveiled at the last WWDC and available from December 2017.
These devices are a combination of sophisticated sensors,
speakers and microphones designed to provide quality sound
and speech recognition from anywhere in a room (and with
cancellation systems that recognize a command even when music
is playing), with a virtual assistant developed independently,
and that can be associated with other devices. Alexa, Google
Assistant and Siri, provide a combination of microphones
and speakers with their “intelligent” characteristics.
The battle, logically, has a much more important
connotation in this second segment, which was pioneered
by Apple, which launched Siri in October 2011, followed
by Google, which launched its Google Now in July 2012
and later evolved to Google Assistant and Amazon, which
put Alexa on the market in November 2014 coinciding,
logically, with the launch of Amazon Echo.
The dates here are extremely relevant: the longer these
platforms are on the market, the more data they generate with
which to work and with which to train their algorithms, and
the better they will work. While Apple and Google focused
on their smartphone assistants that could be transferred to the
home, Amazon thought a dedicated device would offer better
performance, and developed Alexa directly with Echo after the
failure of its Fire Phone. The success of Amazon Echo, which
in North American has a market share of 70 percent and is
already present in Germany and the United Kingdom, alarmed
Google and Apple. Meanwhile, Amazon turned its assistant
into an open ecosystem, offering developers the ability to
create skills to equip the device with functionality. As a result
of its wider distribution it is the ecosystem for which there are
the greatest number of skills: virtually all devices for home
automation, from intelligent light bulbs to thermostats and locks.
While Apple still seems to be positioning its HomeKit as a music
player, the struggle between Amazon Echo and Google Home
is more about the quality of the assistant and the integration of
functions. A recent study by an advertising agency based on a
sample of 3,000 questions concluded that the Google assistant
answered six times as many questions correctly as Alexa.
What does this mean? That while Google has been feeding
and developing its Knowledge Graph since 2012 to make it a
fundamental part of its search engine, Amazon relies solely on
the material it obtains through the interaction of its users with
its devices, which are inferior in terms of quality and quantity.
Does this make Amazon the winner? Not quite: owners of this
type of device seem to lean toward using them for automating
tasks and requesting simple functions such as the time, news
or other types of routine requests, rather than asking more
complex questions. Google Home may be smarter when it
comes to answering general questions, but people do not seem
to want that, and instead would prefer it to be able to connect to
other devices, with skills created by more developers and more
day-to-day type features. It would seem people want a diligent
butler more than a wise guy who can answer any question.
How will this competitive dynamic evolve? Is it more important
to focus on ecosystem development and functionality, or
to develop IQ? Or, as Apple seems to be suggesting, doing
one thing very well — putting music on — and seeing how
things develop. Apple mentions the possibility of using its
HomePod for simple tasks like turning on the lights, setting
an alarm clock or reading the news? The contestants are ready
to do battle, promising a truly interesting contest. If they
are currently available in your market, which do you think
you would choose? What would influence your decision?