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Amazon’s Echo has been one of the most successful smart home devices since its launch in November 2014.
The company has sold more than 1.6 million Echos since releasing the product, according to our estimates. That success has driven competition:
- Google released Google Home, a similar connected speaker with many of the same capabilities as the Echo, last month.
- Apple is also opening up Siri to third-party developers to give it many of the same capabilities as the Alexa voice control system that underpins the Echo.
These voice assistant systems will be an important part of how consumers interact with their many connected devices in the future. Right now, consumers control most of their IoT devices through smartphone apps, but requiring consumers to constantly take out their phones every time they interact with one of their many connected devices is impractical, and in some cases (like when driving a car) unsafe.
However, as WIRED explained recently, the Echo a couple of key advantages right now over the competition:
- More Data: Beating its competitors to market with the Echo means that Amazon has now been collecting data about how users interact with the Alexa system for 19 months since the Echo’s release. Amazon has been using that data to constantly improve the machine learning algorithms and natural language processing capabilities behind Alexa. Amazon could deploy Alexa in other forms, like as part of a customer service chatbot, to gather even more data from customer interactions to improve the system, WIRED mentioned.
- AWS Backbone: All of the code running on the Alexa system resides in Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) cloud infrastructure; only a small amount of code actually runs the Echo device itself. This allows Amazon to issue updates to Alexa in a matter of minutes, making it quick and simple to improve the systems’ natural language processing or add new “skills,” the third-party integrations that allow Alexa to interact with other services like Uber or Spotify. These “skills” essentially take the place of smartphone apps in the Alexa ecosystem.
It’s early lead in the market and the flexibility of AWS’ infrastructure means that Amazon’s rivals have a lot of ground to make up to compete with the Echo. Google and Apple will look to make up that ground by leveraging their massive installed base of Android and iOS mobile devices. The two companies have deployed their respective Google Assistant and Siri voice assistant systems on their mobile platforms, so they can collect huge amounts of data on how users interact with those systems, giving them a chance to rapidly make up ground against Alexa.
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