Narrative: Amazon is Ahead in Voice

Updated: April 21, 2017

This narrative was the subject of the Weekly Narrative Video on April 21, 2017. You can view the video on YouTube here, or see it embedded below.

Ever since the launch of Amazon’s Echo home speaker, two related narratives have emerged: voice is the way we’ll engage with our gadgets in future, and Amazon is far ahead of the competition here. I think both those narratives are overblown, and I’ll explain why.

Firstly, Amazon obviously didn’t invent the voice UI – it’s been around for decades in both reality and science fiction, and even in the context of our smart devices has been one of a number of built-in ways in which we interact with our devices at least since the launch of Siri on the iPhone 4s in 2011. But voice isn’t and can’t be the only way we interact with our devices – there are still far too many scenarios where it’s either inappropriate or ineffective, because of ambient noise, privacy concerns, bothering others around us, and so on. The home is clearly one scenario where these barriers are less likely to be present, but in almost all others these come up frequently. As such, voice will continue to sit alongside touch and other interfaces, rather than becoming the one or even the dominant way we interact with our devices.

Secondly, Amazon’s Echo is very effective, but only where it exists. It works well precisely because it’s unencumbered by the challenges that hamper performance of voice interfaces on small portable devices like smartphones and smartwatches. It has several microphones and a large speaker, and the whole device is designed around voice interactions. That makes it very good at recognizing speech, but that skill set is almost impossible to replicate in a smaller device. It’s not that Amazon is better at voice recognition than Apple or Google are, it’s that it’s put voice recognition on a device that doesn’t have to fit in your pocket or on your wrist. I’ve found Google’s Home to be at least as good on this point, and I’ve no doubt that were Apple to release a Siri Speaker, it would perform equally well.

The challenge is that the Echo as a device and Alexa as a capability may as well not exist when you leave the house, and that’s where Google and Apple still have a huge advantage when it comes to voice assistants and personal digital assistants in general. Theirs are ubiquitous, whereas Amazon’s is home-bound. I tend to think people are going to want to use the same assistant everywhere they go, rather than learning to use and training two separate assistants at home and on the go. So the question becomes whether Amazon will be able to find ways to make Alexa mobile faster than Google and Apple can achieve mainstream adoption of their equivalent devices for the home. That seems far from a foregone conclusion, because Alexa needs to be not just present but baked in on a mobile device if it’s to compete with Siri and the Google Assistant, and it’s hard to see that happening on a scale that makes a difference.

In short, then, the prevailing narrative that voice is going to dominate future interactions and Amazon has already won in voice is overblown and misleading. The best we can say is that voice will be one of several important user interfaces, and that Amazon has a very good entrant in one particular category of personal digital assistant – speaker-based ones for the home. Beyond that, it’s still a wide-open field with Apple and Google the clear leaders in mobile personal assistants and everyone else an also-ran.