Alexa and Google Home

Alexa and Google Home

By Madhuri Podugu

After a long journey on smartphones, voice assistants are becoming the center of attraction to consumers and retailers. Amazon Echo, also known as Alexa, and Google home are smart speakers that respond to user’s voice, play music and control associated devices. These virtual speakers not only captivating consumers interests, they are also representing the futuristic world on the interaction with artificial intelligence. The 9.2 inches Echo and 5.6 inches Google Home can be activated through calling their respective names. The primary difference between these devices is the frame of reference, as the Echo connects to Amazon assistant and Google Home connects to Google assistant. Though the devices have their own push and pull factors, it is worth to buy at least one of them, since they give valuable new insights into consumers’ lives.

The tech companies began their virtual assistant contest in 2011 when Apple launched Siri. The success of Siri, in turn, gave tech giants a new problem, errors in the computer interface. But speech recognition software has recently improved, and the ambitious or optimized companies started to shift their attention towards this field by investing their money. Amazon’s Alexa assistant made $180 Echo and launched it in late 2014, the estimates showed that it had sold three million units in the United States itself (Simonite). Likewise, in November of 2016, Google assistant released Google home with the price of $130. This device is way less than the Echo and has been providing advanced features like multiple users, voice recognition, several smart-home integrations and cooking assistance for more than 5 million recipes. There could be a small price change between these products, but this change gave Google an opportunity to catch up with its competitive, Echo. The reason would be the law of demand because when Amazon released Alexa, people bought the device without any concern and there was no substitute for the Echo at that time. When google released a similar product with much less price, consumers demand on Google Home increased and the demand for Echo decreased. The Emarketer claims that, “Amazon’s market share to fall slightly in the coming years, as Google’s share grows. But Amazon will remain the dominant player in the category for the foreseeable future”(Emarketer). Though Google Home has high rates for its revenue to increase, it will still be behind the Amazon’s Echo because Amazon entered the virtual market way earlier than Google did and it will be the lead for all its competitors.

  

The VoiceLabs graph from above shows the intense growth in the number of virtual assistant users during the time of holiday season. As it can be seen, the quantity demanded for Google Home quadrupled from December 24th to December 26th. Both products faced initial surge through an increase in consumer’s tastes and preferences on smart speakers. This change, in turn, decreased the barriers and allowed other small companies to enter the market. Also, the Emarketer forecasted about 2017 usage of these devices, “This year, 35.6 million Americans will use a voice-activated assistant device at least once a month. That’s a jump of 128.9% over last year” (Kinsella).

Although Alexa and Google Home are attracting consumers by their striking features, they are also facing privacy issues and affecting firms from other markets. The digital assistants could be everyone’s perfect personal buddies, but at the same time, they would be listening and recording each conversation a person makes. According to USA Today, it stated that, “Alexa detects its wake word and glows blue, it streams "a fraction of a second of audio before the wake word" to the Amazon's servers and closes once your command has been processed. That fraction of a second gets saved along with your main command” (Kom). Consumers should calculate the opportunity cost of their privacy and their satisfaction. Though the virtual assistant devices have an option to be turned off, they will record or listen to consumers’ conversations and this might be an issue to those who want to be in private. In addition, Alexa and Google Home are creating difficult situations for firms and workers in the grocery department. The Accenture’s managing director, Rick Murray claimed that, “Grocery is the most obvious area for disruption, both for mundane commodity items but also for inspiration” (Bowden). The virtual assistants might overtake some firms and also create structural unemployment in the grocery market. Overall, Alexa and Google Home are unique devices that have lot of opportunities and might be one of the major fields in the future.      

Works Cited

6 April, 2017 By Grace Bowden. "Analysis: How Google Home and Amazon Alexa Could Change Retail." Retail Week. Web. 16 May 2017.

"Alexa, Say What?! Voice-Enabled Speaker Usage to Grow Nearly 130% This Year." EMarketer. 08 May 2017. Web. 16 May 2017.

"Amazon Echo and Google Home Were Smash Hits This Holiday Season." VoiceLabs. 20 Jan. 2017. Web. 16 May 2017.

Andrew Gebhart April 28, 2017 5:00 AM PDT @GebAndrew. "Google Home vs. Amazon Echo: Round 2 -- Google Strikes Back." CNET. 28 Apr. 2017. Web. 16 May 2017.

Kinsella, Bret. "35 Million Americans Will Use Amazon Alexa and Google Home Monthly in 2017." Voicebot. 08 May 2017. Web. 16 May 2017.

Kom, Kim, and O , Special for USA TODAY. "Virtual Standoff: Amazon Echo vs. Google Home." USA Today. Gannett Satellite Information Network, 30 Dec. 2016. Web. 16 May 2017.

Simonite, Tom. "Virtual Assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant Will Feed Tech Giants Valuable New Data about Us." MIT Technology Review. MIT Technology Review, 02 June 2016. Web. 16 May 2017.

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