For non-English natives it might still be hard to believe but the voice market is estimated to be worth 40 Billion dollars by 2020 in the US and UK alone. Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung were all quick to announce a voice assistant (with Facebook ‘Aloha’ soon to follow). All equally useless at first but after incentivizing their users to use it (Bixby button anyone…), they soon became very valuable. However, a technology that is fueled by data also has a significant downside, it is bound to become a market dominated by a few large players.
The most successful of the 4, Google & Amazon, now have assistants fully capable of conversing and have thousands of third party apps already available in their ‘open’ ecosystems. However, on closer inspection these already dominant platforms aren’t so open. Smaller commerce shops like the Dutch Cool Blue won’t have to try to sell through Alexa and we also don’t have to expect Google allowing others to use Google Assistants data for advertising.
One might argue that they don’t have to be open as it is their innovation. True, but, you must consider that these platforms will get better with usage and that therefor only those with large, active user basis’s will be valuable. I mean who wants to use Bixby at this point? Meaning that smaller players would not even be able to compete on this enormous market.
I argue that the voice assistant market will have a future like that of phone operating systems, dominated by few. An unwanted outcome that will hurt consumers in the long run. Smart voice assistants will have a significant, continuous impact on our lives. The current development stage of speech recognition allows us to still alter this projected outcome. Truly open alternatives like Mozilla Common Voice (which you can help train today) are out there and it is up to us, the consumers, to motivate manufacturers to implement it into their products.
https://voice.mozilla.org/
Voice shopping estimated to hit $40+ billion across U.S. and U.K. by 2022
IMG from: https://www.pcmag.com/article/357520/the-best-smart-speakers
