INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Amazon device event today played host to a dizzying number of product announcements, of all stripes — but notably, there are three brand
new ways to wear Alexa on your body
Amazon clearly wants to give you plenty of options to take Alexa with you when you leave the house, the only place it really held sway so
far — but can Amazon actually convince people that it the voice interface for everywhere, and not just for home?
Among the products Amazon
announced at its Seattle event, Echo Frames, Echo Loop and Echo Buds all provide ways to take Alexa with you wherever you go
What super interesting — and telling — about this is that Amazon went with three different vectors to try to convince people to wear
Alexa, instead of focusing its efforts on just one
That indicates a stronger than ever desire to break Alexa out of its home environment.
The company has tried to get this done in different
Alexa has appeared in Bluetooth speakers and headphones, in some cars (including now GM, as of today) and via Amazon own car accessory —
and though the timing didn''t line up, it would&ve been a lock for Amazon failed Fire Phone.
Notice that none of these existing examples
have helped Amazon gain any apparent significant market share when it comes to Alexa use on the go
While we don''t have great stats on how well-adopted Alexa is in-car, for instance, it stands to reason that we&d be hearing a lot more
about its success if it was indeed massively successful — in the same way we hear often about Alexa prevalence in the home.
Amazon lacks a
key vector that other voice assistants got for free: Being the default option on a smartphone
Google Assistant manages this through both Google own, and third-party Android, phones
Apple Siri isn''t often celebrated for its skill and performance, but there no question that it benefits from being the only really viable
option on iOS when it comes to voice assistant software.
Amazon had to effectively invent a product category to get Alexa any traction at
all — the Echo basically created the smart speaker category, at least in terms of significant mass market uptake
Its success with its existing Echo devices proves that this category served a market need, and Amazon has reaped significant reward as a
result.
But for Amazon, a virtual assistant that only operates in the confines of the home covers only a tiny part of the picture when it
comes to building more intelligent and nuanced customer profiles, which is the whole point of the endeavor to begin with
While Americans seem to be spending more time at home than ever before, a big percentage of peoples& days is still spent outside, and this
is largely invisible to Alexa.
The thing is, the only reliable and proven way to ensure you&re with someone throughout their entire day is
to be on their smartphone
Alexa is, via Amazon own app, but that a far cry from being a native feature of the device, and just a single tap or voice command away
Amazon own smartphone ambitions deflated pretty quickly, so now it casting around for alternatives — and Loop, Frames and Buds all
represent its most aggressive attempts yet.
A smart spread of bets, each with their own smaller pool of penetration among users versus a
general staple like a smartphone, might be Amazon best way to actually drive adoption — especially if they&re not concerned with the
overall economics of the individual hardware businesses attached to each.
The big question will be whether A) these products can either
offer enough value on their own to justify their continued use while Alexa catches up to out-of-home use cases from a software perspective,
or B) Amazon Alexa team can iterate the assistant feature set quickly enough to make it as useful on the go as it is at home, which hasn''t
seemed like something it been able to do to date (not having direct access to smartphone functions like texting and calling is probably a
big part of that).
Specifically for these new products, I&d put the Buds at the top of the list as the most likely to make Alexa a boon
companion for a much greater number of people
The buds themselves offer a very compelling price point for their feature set, and Alexa coming along for the ride is likely just a bonus
for a large percentage of their addressable market
Both the Frames and the Loop seem a lot more experimental, but Amazon limited release go-to-market strategy suggest it has planned for that
as well.
In the end, these products are interesting and highly indicative of Amazon direction and ambition with Alexa overall, but I don''t
think this is the watershed moment for the digital assistant beyond the home
Still, it probably among the most interesting spaces in tech to watch, because of how much is at stake for both winners and losers.
