Is Amazon an "Everywhere Everything" Software Platform?

Amazon is an Alexa Everything Company

As impressive as Amazon’s foray into hardware and the smart home is, the evolution of Alexa and the personal assistant is what really fascinates me.

Way more interesting than Apple’s event — while we still await the Microsoft and Google event — Amazon has a direct to consumer relationship that might hinge in the future on Alexa’s success.

Amazon unveiled several new Echo devices and Alexa features at its annual hardware event on Wednesday.

The company launched its competitor to Apple’s AirPods, called the Echo Buds. These could help bring Alexa outside the smart home and in that respect could be more useful than Siri or Google Assistant one day.

Amazon’s new smart glasses, the Echo Frames, also show the incredible potential Amazon could have in the wearables sector currently dominated by Apple. We know Amazon has room to take advertising marketshare from Google and search eyeballs, but Amazon could take on Apple with Alexa. Few people understand the ramifications.

Echo Frames have the Alexa voice assistant built in, meaning you can talk to it anywhere, any time. Their invite-only beta will mean owning a pair will cost about $180.

Amazon needs to become an AI-centric company and for the consumer Alexa is the bridge to that world. Amazon also showed off new Alexa capabilities, such as a multilingual mode and new ways to add it to smart security devices. While Google Assistant is an incredible product, Alexa might scale better in the decade ahead.

Alexa on the Go, Taking Amazon with Us Outside the Smart Home

The Echo Buds and Echo Frames show the tremendous Alexa-ubiquity we are going to have as we take Alexa with us on the go. The Echo Frames are Alexa-enabled, meaning the wearer can speak a command to Amazon’s voice assistant and the glasses will hear it. In turn, the wearer will be able to hear Alexa’s response thanks to directional microphones built into the frames and pointed at their ears — bystanders won’t be able to eavesdrop, at least in theory.

In an era when Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri have sizzled out, Google Assistant and Alexa compete for dominance.

It’s still unclear exactly how Amazon’s hardware devices help the company’s bottom line. While hardware devices are consistently the bestselling products on Amazon, the company does not disclose how much revenue they generate.

While I’m starting to get impressed with Google’s smartphone efforts, in hardware Amazon makes Facebook look like the imposter in the sector it is with its nearly-failed Portal product.

Unlike Snap’s Spectacles, the Echo Frames do not have cameras to take photos or record videos. Amazon is touting this as a positive; it’s part of why the smart glasses weigh just over one ounce. Amazon understands what wearables could become once they get smarter.

Amazon is even crowdsourcing Alexa answers. That is, Amazon is now letting everyday users help the company come up with better responses for its Alexa voice assistant platform!

Amazon continues to have a foothold in the smart speaker space, controlling 70% of the market, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. However, rivals such as Google are catching up. In China, Baidu and Alibaba are doing incredibly in catching up to the Duopoly in the West. It’s very exciting times for smart assistants, as they transition from the smart home to the wearables and hands-free mobile sector.

Alexa is already a robust voice platform and the most widely adopted one in use today. Increasingly we live in the era of the internet-of-things (IoT) that will with 5G begin to encompass not just the smart home but all of society. All of this data will be integrated to provide more AI consumer convenience. Companies like Amazon, Google and Apple are at the center of how this will occur.

To bring Alexa mobile outside the home, Amazon announced a competitor to Apple’s AirPods called the Echo Buds. The $129 earbuds have Alexa built into them and feature five hours of battery life, as well as noise cancellation technology from Bose. That’s a pretty attractive price point. If only they would make Alexa’s voice a bit more appealing!

I’m not so much interested in the slew of echo devices that rains with much frequency each year. I’m more interested in how Alexa can evolve to truly be more consumer-centric and personalized to how we live our lives. Alexa needs to be smarter than Google Assistant and more personalized, because Google already has Maps, Android, a viable smartphone and better language NLP inclusion for more countries globally.

• Amazon’s Echo Buds could be a better fit than Airbuds for someone like me who is really into fitness.
• The Echo Buds’ noise reduction in particular sets them apart from Apple’s offering, according to some gadget analysts.
• They use Bose’s active noise-reduction technology and a sealed design to drown out background noise when in use.

The look of these things is never quite “acceptable” to me. But what to do? We have to get used to being information cyborgs.

How smart was Amazon to partner with Bose though really? Already such a trusted elite brand in the space. Amazon’s page for the Echo Buds mentions Bose’s noise reduction technology multiple times.

Alexa, wanna take a walk outside?

From an Amazon Smart Oven to experimental fun stuff, so much hinges on the success of Alexa now for Amazon.

As a futurist obsessed with Amazon, I’ll be covering all the good points as often as I can.

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