Money quote at the end:
"“A huge part of an assistant is search,” he said. “Google is a search company. Amazon is not.”
"“A huge part of an assistant is search,” he said. “Google is a search company. Amazon is not.”
You can't pigeonhole conglomerates like that. Google is an email company, Amazon is a cloud hosting provider, Microsoft is a tablet PC maker, Samsung is a heavy equipment company. No wait, Google is a browser vendor, Amazon is a bookstore, Microsoft is the maker of an office suite, and Samsung makes hardware for the iPhone.
Or maybe they're all tech companies and specialize in multiple aspects of that industry.
Amazon's tech is all an effort to extend their reach in their primary business: selling products (both physical and digital) to customers. Google's tech, on the other hand, is all in an effort to extend the reach of their ad and marketing services.
[1] https://a9.com/
What appealed to me about it was that the examples given were simple and practical.
As a global store front and supply chain, Amazon has a serious advantage in that area... manufacturers are more inclined to cooperate and integrate with the Alexa ecosystem. Amazon's end-game is obviously "sell more stuff" - obvious benefits for the manufacturers. I can't see a clear vision behind Google's plan.
However, so far every device is a walled garden, a locked-in ecosystem - bleh, huge turnoff.
Is there prior work in developing an an open assistant/querying protocol for these kinds of devices? Some standard way for devices to get data after the device has handled wakewords and speech-to-text? It's a fascinating domain, but I don't have enough knowledge to bootstrap myself yet.
It very well could have ended saying "Google isn't an e-commerce company."
As far as I am concerned Amazon is a search company with two day shipping.