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Amazon's Alexa is Getting Clobbered (axios.com)
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.
>> 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%
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.)
I still don't have a good intuition as to what the market for smart speakers is, and how large it might be. Unfortunately the blurb doesn't have any details on what the size of the market is, or how the market in 2018 might be compared to 2016. It doesn't even mention if amazon alexa sales are increasing, flat, or declining.
Just because the market share of Alexa went down doesn't mean the absolute numbers of Alexa devices are down. There are now even more devices spying, but not from Amazon, and they are dwarfing Amazon's numbers.
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 outsold them, but I think the market share of people that give a crap about these devices has already bought their device.
Disclaimer: I don't own any of these devices, find them useless.
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.
To say this means Amazon is collapsing because they don't share in a particular market says nothing about how their market share of their target market is doing. It's like saying all other languages besides cantonese and mandarin are failing because more people speak those two. They have the largest and fastest growing market share of deployed languages.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
Some sort of platform, that advertises that they can rapidly add servers to your platform, they could call it the Awesome Web Services platform or AWS for short!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
Get rid of surveillance devices in your house TODAY.
"Why do all home assistant names end with a vowel?"
I think it indicates a female, at least in European languages.
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.
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.
Better known as 318230.
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.
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 hard time believing that it won't actually happen. Hope to be proven wrong.
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.
#DeleteFacebook
"Why do all home assistant names end with a vowel?"
I think it indicates a female, at least in European languages.
My daughter's name is Zrngplt, you insensitive clod.
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.
Latin America goes for male voices as well, which leads to the interesting phone tree opening with a female voice greeting you in English, followed by a male voice saying “para Español, marque nueve”.
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.