The Amazon Echo is a certified hit. Voice now seems obvious as the natural interface for devices within the confines of the home—and the Echo looks like a glaring miss for Apple, Google, and Microsoft—companies that have mature digital assistants and the hardware expertise to produce an Echo-like device. Spurred on by an increasing number of open APIs Amazon has been adding functionality at a rapid pace—you can now order an Uber, control your thermostat, stream music from Spotify, and more1 from the Echo. It feels like the beginning of the smart home revolution that tech companies have been promising since Bill Gates laid miles of ethernet and fiberoptic cable in his Seattle mansion in the late 1990s. Competitors are already starting to arrive, but it’s a market that’s still in its infancy—and one that Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Apple will want a piece of. As the Echo is showing us, these digital assistant-powered devices are primed to be the smarts behind the smart home.
Microsoft’s digital assistant is named Cortana and is built into Windows 10. While Cortana is relatively new and unrefined compared to the competition, Microsoft has the necessary technologies to compete in this space with their impressive cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence framework. They also have existing products like the Kinect and the HoloLens that could enable interesting complimentary experiences.
Over in Menlo Park, Facebook is building a text-based assistant with it’s “Facebook M” project. Built into Facebook Messenger and powered by Facebook’s own AI, Facebook M is currently in closed beta. An acquisition or partnership with the well received digital assistant application Hound would make for an interesting software-focused play for Facebook, especially given SoundHound’s Houndify platform initiative.
Google has had Google Now, their digital assistant technology, since it was released with Android 4.1 (“Jelly Bean“) in 2012. Their “Ok, Google” phrase activation is better than the competition, and given their interest in the smart home, expertise in server infrastructure, and artificial intelligence prowess2, this seems like a natural product area for the company. They already have a product that sits in the home with the Google OnHub. It has a speaker, but no microphones and none of the software functionality that makes the Echo so useful. One possible reason for this is that Nest, a Google acquisition focused on smart home products, has been tainted by it’s association with “creepy Google”3. An anonymous source inside Google acknowledged as much to Recode:
Senior executives at Nest had considered making a product similar to Echo, a voice-activated personal assistant, according to sources. But the plans were never hatched, largely out of concern that consumers would be too reticent of such a device tied to the search giant.
“At the end of the day, it’s Google,” said one source familiar with the situation. “There are trust issues.”
It’s clear that at least some people feel that an always on, always listening device from an Alphabet (née Google) company may not be welcome in people’s homes.
Finally, famously first and not always first to market in a given product category, Apple is uniquely poised to make a play in this space. Their big advantage is their existing mobile operating system, iOS. iOS is an absolutely massive platform with over 1.5 million applications available for download. Apple could leverage this platform to create a peerless experience by opening up the API that allows applications to register a vocal command interface with Siri in their upcoming release of iOS, iOS 104.
Much of the technical work for this has already been done—in iOS 8 they introduced extensions, allowing third-party applications to safely interact with the system; in iOS 9 they introduced the Core Spotlight Framework, allowing applications to register information as searchable by the system; and assuming the rumors that Siri is coming to the Mac this summer are true, the architecture has already been untied from the iPhone. Apple’s home speaker hardware (iPod, anyone?) would talk to your phone wirelessly5 and offer any Siri integrations for apps you already have on your phone in addition to it’s built-in functionality—tight integration with Apple Music and Apple’s other services. No need to hassle with yet another App Store6. By leveraging the work developers had done to support Siri with their iOS apps, Apple could debut their product with tens of thousands of integrations, all available on day one.
While there are hurdles—like Siri’s general usefulness and reliability7—Apple has long prided themselves on offering high quality products differentiated by their ‘whole widget’ approach of building both the hardware and the software. With their legendary industrial design team, Apple’s ability to create a beautiful object is beyond doubt. If they can nail the software as well, they have legions of fans already invested in the iOS ecosystem waiting to give them a foothold in the smart home.
There are over 300 “skills” (Amazon’s parlance for applications) currently available for the Echo.↩︎
Google’s AlphaGo AI, powered by DeepMind, just became the first AI to ever beat a world-class player at the board game Go.↩︎
I think that Google Glass, despite it’s ultimate failure as a product, was the tipping point for public perception in this regard.↩︎
iOS 10 will be announced this summer at WWDC.↩︎
Because of the importance of latency with a voice interface and the flakiness of current wireless technologies, the speaker would need to somehow download these Siri API modules, either from your phone or from the cloud.↩︎
Apps on the Apple Watch have largely been a flop. Not every platform needs it’s own App Store.↩︎
Apple has been slowly improving Siri.↩︎