The voice assistant war: What if nobody wins?

“One of the clearest developments that came out of 2018, and prominently on display last week in Las Vegas at CES 2019, was the rise of the embedded voice assistant. Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant were omnipresent at the show,” Bob O’Donnell writes for Tech.pinion. “Combine that with recent numbers from Amazon and Google about compatible device shipments, and it’s clear that voice assistants have gone mainstream.”
“Amazon is generally seen as winning the war so far, but Google has been coming on strong, plus Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung are too big to ignore, especially given how young this market still is,” O’Donnell writes. “The dynamics of the voice assistant are now becoming much more complex. At this year’s CES, for example, we started to see even more devices that are supporting multiple voice assistant platforms… An even more confounding problem that consumers are likely to start facing this year is owning multiple products with different smart assistant platforms.”
“While some people may be perfectly comfortable working across multiple voice assistants, and actually remembering which ones are enabled on which devices, most people are likely to get quickly confused in such a scenario,” O’Donnell writes. “Most of the major platforms are working to address the multiple device response issue as we speak, but it remains to be seen how effective it will be as more and more voice assistant-enabled devices start to make their way into people’s homes.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Our homes, vehicles, and offices could soon become, if they’re not already, a veritable cacophony of voice assistants trying to outshout each other trying to deliver today’s weather, news, sports scores, etc.!