Amazon's Alexa is Getting Clobbered (axios.com) 86
An anonymous reader writes: In the first quarter of 2016, Amazon Echo held 80% of the global smart assistant market, according to marketing research firm Canalys. Chinese companies were so far behind that they registered zero. But just a year later, Amazon has collapsed to a 28% market share, behind Google Home's 36% and ahead of China's Alibaba and Xiaomi with a combined 19%. Amazon had a strong head start with its Echo lineup, which launched in 2014. But now it's losing ground both in the U.S. and China, the leading markets for the devices.
Waaahmbulance is coming! (Score:1)
And are we supposed to shed crocodile tears for Amazon over this? Oh no! This one spying device now has less marketshare than a bunch of other spying devices! Oh the humanity!!
Re:Waaahmbulance is coming! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Waaahmbulance is coming! (Score:5, Informative)
they are dwarfing Amazon's numbers.
TFA is about sales, not the installed base.
There are about 20 million Amazon Echo devices in use.
There are about 7 million Google Home devices.
Amazon still dominates.
Disclaimer: I have both an Echo and a Google Home. I use the Echo more because it is in the kitchen, which is convenient for news updates, voice management of shopping lists, etc. The "Home" is in my wife's home office, and she uses it mostly for listening to music.
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Statistics are nothing to be scared of for someone who can think critically.
Statistics are not scary, but the presentation of said statistics should be of concern to anyone who realizes that most people lack the ability to think critically. It is in their presentation that statistics can mislead - usually due to omitted information.
Re: Waaahmbulance is coming! (Score:1)
But if you CAN think critically, you and infer the biases pretty easily.
Try Brand C shampoo, the number one, fastest growing, herbal based, men's shampoo!
Is it number one? No., otherwise they would have a period, not fastest growing.
But it is the fastest growing at least, right? Selling one then selling three is 300% growth, but still no, because they needed to add a "herbal based".
But great for organics least right? Nope, it didn't say organic, it said herbal based not organic (which means nothing in label
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Statistics are nothing more than math tainted with politics, with predictable results.
Statistics are nothing to be scared of for someone who can think critically.
Statistics can often be pushed a little bit towards what you want: A British classic [youtube.com].
Statistics, like any other information needs to be looked at critically. Now more than ever - people seem to believe anything, especially regarding Trump. Pro and con, even though most of the weird stuff comes from the Pro-Trumps.
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An Anonymous Coward, apparently quoting himself, sneered:
Statistics are nothing more than math tainted with politics, with predictable results.
Obligatory classic quote on the subject from an actual politician:
"There are three types of lie: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
- Benjamin Disreali
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I can't fucking stand statistics. No matter how valid a tool it could be, someone will always find a way to abuse statistics to manipulate facts, ultimately making the tool worthless in the end.
I suppose you hate painkillers too?
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English collapsing, chinese market share overtake (Score:3)
The "article" is vacuous. Shorter than even a typical USA today article. Have attention spans reached that low now in the age of smart phones? No article longer than the mean time between twitter update beeps to nudge your attention away.
Anyhow the claim of the article is because foreign based internet systems do poorly in the chinese market that Chinese people buy home domestic systems.
Presumably the reverse it true. I'm not tempeted to buy a TenCent or baidu based smart speaker for my home in the USA.
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Have attention spans reached that low now in the age of smart phones?
Alexa gives me the news summary in 20 second audio snippets. So if the article is longer than that, I won't hear it.
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You're lucky your comment fits in 144 characters otherwise I wouldn't have read it.
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this is funny
Re:Waaahmbulance is coming! (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair... yeah, they all track everything you do with those devices. I find Google's to be more invasive though.
If you adjust ANY privacy settings in your google profile to not track you then the Google Home won't work. You have to completely open yourself up to google and have wide-open inadvisable permissions in your google account just to use the Google Home. Because I told Google not to track certain aspects of my web browser google home won't work.
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Back in ye olden days we found out people respond better to women. Both genders find them less threatening.
So you'll note most IVR systems have female voices, or these days personas. It extended to bots / assistants.
Re:Closed ecosystem (Score:4, Informative)
Back in ye olden days we found out people respond better to women. Both genders find them less threatening.
This is culturally dependent. In America, Europe, and Japan automated voices are generally female. In Asia and the Mideast, they are usually male.
Re:Closed ecosystem (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Closed ecosystem (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not getting a IVR until it also has a form in the shape of a cute 2D waifu. And so far the gatebox is Japanese only. But once a company can combine this with good AR, I'm buying one even if it's only for the constant companionship.
Re: Closed ecosystem (Score:2)
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I thought the opposite. People respond to female voices because they're MORE threatening.
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"Why do all home assistant names end with a vowel?"
I think it indicates a female, at least in European languages.
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Yes, there is no such rule in Europe that the mere presence of a any vowel at the end of the name means it's a female name.
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Mario and Luigi would like a word with you.
Do exceptions mean there is no rule?
Those aren't exceptions. Italian names, as a rule, end in vowels; feminine names, as a rule, end in the letter 'a'.
In the USA, Hugo, Leo, and Theo would also like a word.
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Hugo is not a shortening of anything. In Italian, Leo would be shortened from Leonardo and Theo to Teodoro. So even if two of them are shortened the long form still has a vowel at the end so you still fail.
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"Why do all home assistant names end with a vowel?"
I think it indicates a female, at least in European languages.
Hey everybody, we found more sexism! Do I get a pat on the back? (Or a Patricia?)
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No it doesn't. You may be incorrectly thinking of a rule like changing O to A or adding an A at the end of a name in languages like Spanish makes it female (Antonio->Antonia for example), but the mere presence of a vowel does not make a name female.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Wake word detection algorithms rely on a combination of easy-to-identify spectral features -- you want a nice mix of fricatives, plosives and vowels, ideally in a sequence that doesn't resemble most normal words.
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It's not the first declension [wikipedia.org] for no reason.
Global market stats (Score:3)
This is GLOBAL share. To get to a 28%/36% global share counting the shole that is China and it's direct-to-BigBrother home "shopping/health" appliance is still pretty amazing. (That's a majority share in countries where free speech is still at least a concept.)
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What is the market? (Score:3)
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You're on the right track:
https://voicebot.ai/2017/07/14... [voicebot.ai]
In the 1st quarter of 2016, Amazon Alexa was the *only* home assisted speaker. The only other major voice controls were siri, google now, and cortana. They all got their start on phones. Of course, if you are the only player in a field, you can expect a highly inflated market share. But, being 25% of the market of 4 competitors is kinda about where you should be sitting.
It would be stupid to think you can get 50+% in a competitive field.
(Apple does
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Well, how many people are there on the planet, how many of them live in a country where these smart speakers are available, how many of them can afford one and how many of them are stupid enough to actually buy one?
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Metrics don't compare absolutes (Score:1)
Look, if I have five companies, three of which are heavily subsidized and required by their large population nation states, and two of which have already achieved market saturation, I can't actually compare the small US market share of the non-subsidized companies to the quickly growing and underserved market share in India, China, and countries which have large populations and market dominance by very few subsidized players.
Wake me in five years and we'll talk about who will survive.
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Anyone has any advice on building a Alexa/Siri/OK Google device at home using only local resources ?
If the 1993 68k Macintosh-es were able to accept vocal commands with PlainTalk without internet connections https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] we should be able to do this today easily.
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Mozilla have developed and continue to work on an open source, non spying speech recognition system. If you want to build speech controlled stuff, that wouldn't be a bad place to start.
Amazon WAS the market (Score:2, Insightful)
What else was there to compete? Amazon was the market with their Echo device back then. Market interest grew, companies threw products to catch up and voila, here we are. Further, Amazon was almost exclusively the US market only with initial Echo. This article is making it sound like Amazon had 80% of the existing market. Their own chart showing Amazon vs Google since Q1 2017 shows Amazon selling a total of about 30 mil in that range, where Google hasn't even hit 20 it seems? So, yeah, Q1 2018 google outsol
If only there was an expandable cloud system.... (Score:3)
'Clobber' your 'digital assistant' with a hammer (Score:3)
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Well, you may also consider that those who do have one in their house willingly just actually deserve to be under surveillance. Some kind of natural selection.
The problem though is that it has indeed long-term impact on all of us, even those that refuse to have those kind of devices. Because the more people will use them, the more they are bound to become, first, a commodity, then eventually become mandatory (of course for national security reasons). This logical path is so obvious that I have a really har
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Because the more people will use them, the more they are bound to become, first, a commodity, then eventually become mandatory (of course for national security reasons). This logical path is so obvious that I have a really hard time believing that it won't actually happen. Hope to be proven wrong.
You, and the guy below you, really sound like trollololololols. I'll just say this: if I'm still alive and the world has become that far gone, then I won't want to keep living in it -- and I'd take as many jackbooted thugs with me as I could before they nailed me.
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Deceptive statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
TFA does not give any actual numbers - only relative percentages. It is possible Alexa's user base has actually grown, but since China now has some sort of similar service, the global market share percentage of Alex will have dropped. That is a pointless statistic, especially if Amazon has not been targeting China in the first place.
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Yes, for instance there’s the Alibaba virtual assistant “Aloxa” which runs on their new internet-connected device “Etcho”. Those seem to have come out of nowhere...
Ok Google... (Score:2)
Good. (Score:3)
When I got my two Alexa Echo's it was primarily to easily play my own mp3 collection in some rooms, but it has a few other extra features, like radio stations etc that were good.
Fast forward to today, Amazon have announced that I will no longer be able to play my own collection through Alexa, and they'll cut me off next year.
I'm pissed at them, and hope the new generation of devices that give user choice, rather than lock-in to a subscription model, win.
I'll be perfectly happy if the innovators are Chinese. I'd rather reward their skill than their place of founding.
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When you say "my own collection", you mean MP3s that you didn't purchase through Amazon, right?
Yeah. That was a bummer; it was good to have music from local bands uploaded to my Amazon account and have it available everywhere (if Amazon had sold their music, I would've bought them through Amazon).
One downside of Amazon Alexa compared to Google Assistant seems to be Amazon Alexa, even on a Fire device, is just an app that can't control other apps. I have music downloaded from Amazon on my tablet device, and
Mycroft.ai ??? (Score:2)
What are /. opinions of Mycroft.ai [mycroft.ai]? For those who've never heard of it, it is a commercial effort to create and maintain open-source software to compete with Alexa & co..