Topic: Assistants

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    Apple Updates Exec Bios to Reflect Siri Move, Cue’s Original Content Push (Sep 1, 2017)

    This is a minor thing, but nevertheless an important one in several ways. Apple has updated the executive bios on its website to reflect a few changes, notably the change in responsibility for Siri from Eddy Cue (generally responsible for online services) to Craig Federighi (responsible for software), and Eddy Cue’s ownership of Apple’s original video content push. That’s notable for two reasons: one is that Eddy Cue has lost other areas of responsibility recently, notably the App Store to Phil Schiller, and Siri is an area where Apple can ill afford to be seen to be falling behind the competition. Taking it away from Cue is likely a sign that Apple wants to see the same rapid improvements there as it did in the App Store when Schiller took over, but also a recognition that the content push is going to take more of Cue’s attention going forward.

    Also worth noting: though there’s still only one woman among Apple’s top-tier leadership of SVPs and CXOs as shown on its executive leadership page, the next tier of VPs is now half women, with three of the four women of color. Diversity in the top ranks at Apple has been poor and slow to change, in part because the senior leadership team has been so stable for so long, but it’s clear that Tim Cook is using the more frequent changes happening at the next tier down to increase diversity there.

    via Mac Rumors

    ★ Amazon and Microsoft Announce Cortana-Alexa Integration (Aug 30, 2017)

    Microsoft and Amazon have officially announced that their respective assistants will begin working together later this year, news broken by the New York Times along with interviews with the companies’ CEOs. Of the four major voice assistants, these two are arguably the weakest, for all that the prevailing narrative is that Amazon is ahead in voice. As a reminder, Amazon has perhaps 15-20 million users of its Alexa assistant today, while Microsoft has 145 million regular Cortana users, Google has hundreds of millions of Android devices in the market with some form of its voice assistant technology, and Apple has nearly a billion Siri-enabled devices in use, with 375 million monthly active users as of June. More importantly, both Amazon and Microsoft are bound to a single category of devices today: home speakers for Amazon and PCs for Microsoft. Yes, both have smartphone apps too, but they’re very much second class citizens behind the built-in assistants available from the lock screen on the two major smartphone platforms. So the coming together here makes a certain amount of sense on that basis.

    However, this doesn’t solve that fundamental problem of getting first party status on smartphones, and the integration the companies will offer will at least at first be both awkward and limited. Users of either assistant will have to invoke the other using double commands (“Cortana, open Alexa…” or vice versa) before even speaking their request. The integration itself will likely focus on smart home control from Cortana and personal information management through Microsoft’s apps from Alexa, filling an important gap in Amazon’s portfolio given that it lacks its own broadly-used calendar, contacts, reminders, or other PIM apps. In theory, the integration will get less awkward at some point down the line, with each assistant deciding on the fly which underlying AI to use to process a request, but in practice that seems challenging.

    For today, it’s relatively straightforward given that the two assistants excel in different domains, but Microsoft’s partners are about to launch the first Cortana-powered speakers and other home devices that will compete more directly with the Amazon Echo, and the overlaps between their capabilities will only grow over time. So who will decide which AI handles which requests? Will this integration only live as long as the companies can agree on that? Or will the lead assistant in each case grab the tasks it wants and leave the dregs for the other? Meanwhile, both Google and Apple will make inroads into the home speaker space in the coming months, allowing them to provide more ubiquitous voice assistants and erode Amazon’s early lead in the home voice market. To summarize, though the logic behind a deal here is reasonably sound, it’s likely to be strained over time and less relevant as the two larger voice platforms expand in the home.

    Note: for non-subscribers, I’ve temporarily opened access to the “Amazon is Ahead in Voice” narrative evaluation linked below, so you can go and read (or watch a video on) the broader context for this move and why I say above that Amazon is one of the weaker rather than stronger players in this market. 

    via New York Times

    Sonos FCC Filing Suggests Voice-Controlled Speaker is Coming Soon (Aug 28, 2017)

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    Google and Walmart partner for Voice Shopping through Google Home (Aug 23, 2017)

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    Samsung Rolls out Bixby to 200 Countries, But Only if You Speak US English or Korean (Aug 22, 2017)

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    Google Seems to be Working on Headphones with Google Assistant (Aug 21, 2017)

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    Google Reportedly Readying New Pixel Laptop and Smaller Home for Fall Launch (Aug 21, 2017)

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    Google Home Phone Call Function Rolls Out to Users in US and Canada (Aug 16, 2017)

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    Amazon Expands Program Paying Popular Alexa Developers (Aug 16, 2017)

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    Anker Debuts Cheaper Echo Dot Competitor Featuring Alexa (Aug 9, 2017)

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    ★ Facebook Reportedly Working on Video Chat Device, Voice Speaker (Aug 1, 2017)

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    Facebook Acquires Conversational AI Startup Ozlo to Beef Up Messenger (Aug 1, 2017)

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    Xiaomi Announces $45 Smart Voice Speaker (Jul 26, 2017)

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    Microsoft Teases a Cortana-Powered Thermostat Made by Johnson Controls (Jul 19, 2017)

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    Samsung Launches Bixby to All in the US Three Months After Galaxy S8 Launch (Jul 19, 2017)

    When the Samsung Galaxy S8 devices were preparing to launch, some were caught off guard by the fact that the English language version of its Bixby voice interface wouldn’t be available when it went on sale. Later, Bixby was released as a limited public beta in the US, and today it’s going to be available as an update to all US owners of the devices, roughly three months after the devices went on sale. At launch, Samsung faced a conundrum: ship a version that wasn’t ready and risk people’s first experiences with Bixby putting them off for life, or delay one of the headline features of the phone for several months, and in the end it plumped for the latter. That was smart, and there seems to have been little backlash about the delay from users (perhaps suggesting they mostly don’t care about it). Reviews based on the early beta release suggested there were some big issues and bugs, but the Journal piece linked here is more positive about it. The big issue remains Samsung’s framing of Bixby as an interface rather than an assistant, after years of smartphone users being trained to see the two as essentially synonymous. But Bixby is definitely not a broad assistant: it can’t answer questions about the world (or in many cases your slice of it), but is very good at controlling device functions and settings, at least within Samsung’s own apps. My brief testing suggests Bixby still pretty glitchy, even in the setup process. The list of third party apps offering Bixby integration hasn’t got much longer since my testing of the device at Samsung’s launch event, and that will be another key challenge here: an assistant that only works for some apps but not others ends up not being very assistive: consistency is the key, something that other assistants have demonstrated through their inconsistency too. If users do adopt Bixby for the things it can do, it’s likely they’ll do so alongside the Google Assistant, which can handle most of the rest, but I could also see many users giving up on Bixby and using just Google’s tool as the one voice interface most likely to help them get things done on their phone. Relatedly, there are reports today that Samsung won’t in fact be making a Bixby voice speaker, something it was reported to be working on earlier, and which I had said made little sense in the context of Bixby as an interface rather than an assistant.

    via WSJ

    Amazon’s Alexa Goes Hands-Free on HTC U11 Smartphone, Falls Short (Jul 17, 2017)

    Amazon’s Alexa assistant has come to a couple of smartphones at this point, debuting on the Huawei Mate 9, but on those devices, it couldn’t respond to a voice command in the way the Echo devices can – invoking Alexa required opening the app. The HTC U11 changes that, by bringing an always-listening version of Alexa to a smartphone for the first time, but this review from the Verge makes clear just how big a challenge Amazon and Alexa still have in front of them in breaking out of the home. The biggest issue is that Alexa doesn’t work until the screen is unlocked, meaning that the always-on feature has a huge handicap. Beyond that, many of the features available in Echo devices are missing, and it’s added nothing to allow Alexa to provide functions people typically use voice assistants on the phone for, such as sending messages or making calls. All of this just confirms what I’ve been saying for some time now about Alexa, which is that it does fine in the home with a limited set of tasks and highly optimized hardware, but is useless out of the home and will struggle to compete with truly integrated assistants like Siri and the Google Assistant, which are baked into phones and their operating systems. It was theoretically possible that Amazon would get some Android vendors to give Alexa true first-party status and phenomenal performance on a phone, but that certainly doesn’t seem to be happening yet, which means that as Google and Apple enter and take share in the voice speaker market, their assistants will start to seem a lot more compelling, because they can be used both at home and out and about, eroding Echo’s two-year head start and the advantages that’s conveyed.

    via The Verge

    Siri Usage Reported to Fall as Alexa and Cortana Grow (Jul 12, 2017)

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    Amazon Talks to Developers About Providing Transcripts of App Interactions (Jul 12, 2017)

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    HomePod Purchase Intent is at 14% of iPhone Owners, per Raymond James Survey (Jul 11, 2017)

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    Alibaba Announces $73 Voice Speaker (Jul 5, 2017)

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