Amazon’s Alexa Threatens Viability Of Google?
Amazon's Alexa, a personal digital assistant, together with the Amazon Echo smart speaker, were accordingly celebrities in this year's Consumer Electronics Show. Apparently, those in attendance were excited over the digital assistant that is not controlled by a touchscreen or keyboard. It is voice-controlled by a speaker/microphone combination called Echo that operates kitchen appliances and changes TV channels.
According to the Business Insider, this is a reflection of the power that Amazon is starting to wield in the emerging smart home market. This is apparently because an increasing number of people begin to rely on their Echo devices to run their homes and to also to automate their lives. The market for the Echo is still small compared to smartphones, but it is reportedly growing fast.
It is also said that Amazon's early success with Alexa is due to the fact that the company did not oversell it. The company bills the Echo as a speaker that is a conventional voice agent that has smart voice commands built in.
As reported by csmonitor, Google has introduced its own at-home digital assistant, called Google Home with its own voice-enabled speaker, designed to compete with the Amazon Echo. But accordingly, since the company earns a lot of its revenues from online ads, others view the growth of screen-less devices as a major threat to the company's future viability. Seemingly, it is noted that if assistants like Alexa prospers, clients will probably spend less time in front of screens looking at Google's search ads.
In comparison, critics say the more Alexa devices Amazon sell, the better Amazon performs doing its core retail business. Echo's client is more likely the one who spend more on books, groceries, music, and movies. Google can also sell as many Google Home devices as the company wants, and is also better at search than Amazon. Nevertheless, Google is a search advertising company, not a retail company. Definitely, the Google Home devices will not deliver ads.
