In this blog I have been commenting on the battle among the personal digital assistants, specifically, Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and Samsung Viv. Up until recently, Alexa only spoke English, but its polyglot abilities have improved. It now speaks German and Japanese too. It is catching up with Google Assistant but still far behind Siri. Amazon Echo and Alexa had a strong international marketing push for the holidays, in over 80 countries. An unofficial number of devices sold in 2017 is 22 million, albeit the majority of them being the low-end Dot device. How do you think buyers in non-English speaking countries, and not in Germany or Japan, are using the speaker if they cannot speak to it? In its aggressive push to earn the trust of 3rd parties, Amazon in 2017 has pursued hardware manufactures to embed Alexa in their devices. Most notably BMW have announced a new skill for Alexa so you can use Alexa at home and in the car, if you own a recent BMW. That was last year. At this week CES show in Las Vegas, Amazon was in full force. Several hardware manufacturers announced Alexa-enabled speakers, alarm clocks, projectors, cameras, and appliances. Corbin Davenport reported the list here. And earlier this year, Amazon opened up Alexa’s voice recognition and NLP services by launching Amazon Lex, to allow 3rd parties build chatbots based on the same technology used by Alexa. The conversational aspects of chatbots built on the Lex platform, and their ability to retain context, only seem to surface in the context of which ‘slot’ a chatbot require. For example, a hotel booking chatbot must have an arrival date, checkout date, category, city, and price range. The conversation between the user and hotel booking chatbot built on Lex will only occur in the context of these slots. In their quest for fast market dominance, Amazon should not discount the reservations on user experience. While app reviews are not conclusive, they are indicative of user sentiment. In comparing the 2017 reviews, Google Assistant App reviews are 4.2 and 4.1 out of 5 stars, for Android and iOS, respectively. Alexa App reviews are 3.5 on Android and a mere 2.6 rating for the iOS version. We should expect Amazon to redirect some of their investments into making Alexa smarter and improve the user experience in 2018. |
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