Amazon Is Winning the Battle for the Home Operating System | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Is Winning the Battle for the Home Operating System

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25 pointskiyanwang57 comments

I do not want a centralized, home assistant that controls and monitors everything unless it is open source software hosted on my own computers that stores data on my own servers, without sending to 3rd parties.

So, https://home-assistant.io then?

Are you working on making this a reality? Or do you know of people who are, that you can share with us?

Because complaining about, or refusing to buy, Amazon's or Google's offering, is not furthering your desired outcome. The only way to beat them is to actually make what you describe more useful and user-friendly than what they are offering.

If parent’s desired outcome is to not own a closed source centralized home monitoring system, refusing to buy Amazon or Google’s offering is in fact ensuring their desires are satisfied.

If parent said they really wanted a home assistant, but felt a conflicted due to their desire for it to be open source, they’d have an issue.

Personally I just don’t adopt this tech. I used to be an early adopter but I don’t really need more efficient ways to buy Amazon stuff and the Spotify app already makes a great music remote for my home stereo.

Indeed, I have very little desire for the tech anyway...but if I were to go that way, I'd want to own the data.

I'm curious about what recording everything in my home, and then seeking legal protections on it as my intellectual property (e.g. copyright) could benefit me. Could I sue spying apps as copyright infringement?

I have not the time, skill, or desire to make this software. I am a scientist, busy doing science.

However, voicing my desire for such IS useful, because if enough people voice it, then someone might decide there is a market for it, and build it.

How such a venture could make money, I have no idea. Systems set up and installation, I suppose.

"Amazon is winning the battle for the home audio surveillance system."

Winning battles, sure.

Winning the war? Way to early to tell, right?

"This year 35.6 million Americans will use a voice-activated assistant device at least once a month."[0] That's just over 10% of Americans, and quite frankly I'm surprised it's that high. Once a month is a pretty low bar to clear anyways.

While I don't doubt that some set of devices in this category will someday saturate American homes, I highly doubt they're going to look like today's Echo. I just don't think that, in 2017, it's solving a problem in a compelling enough way to buy it to augment your smartphone, Roku-esque digital media player, or stereo system.

Amazon has built a good foundation for itself, but I think it's useful to remember just how immature this market is.

[0]: https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Alexa-Say-What-Voice-Enabl...

If you're comparing Apple and almost any competitor on the basis of market share, Apple is going almost always going to look like a loser.

Re-do this analysis and look at profit margins instead, and see how Apple looks.

Why on earth would a consumer care about profit margins?

A consumer might not care about profit margins per se, but a producer will. Hence why most money-making apps are built for iOS first before being ported over to the less-profitable Android.

An incentive structure like that means that the Apple ecosystem will typically have the first-and-best development support.

That is why a consumer might care.

None of that has anything to do with Apple's own profit margins.

A company is incentivized to keep supporting a product that is profitable.

historically apple isnt known for legacy support

Are you kidding? I'm typing this on an 8-year old Macbook Air running High Sierra. Apple supports their phones 4-5 years on current OS's.

Unprofitable companies historically become unviable options.

Profit can be a measure of quality, assuming an efficient market.

They shouldn't. This was a business analysis. Apple doesn't want to have 70% of market share, they want 90% of profits.

Apple and Samsung are the only companies making a profit selling mobile phones, and apple makes vastly more profits than samsung does, with a much smaller fraction of the market share.

How true is that? Apple hardware is expensive, yes. But Apple provides everything including research and design of every aspect of that product from the individual chips (designed in house) to the highest level software services. Unlike Amazon, ongoing support and services is not paid for with a monthly subscription. I know Apple is profitable, but is it by THAT much? Their costs are much much higher than just the bill of materials.

Apple is absolutely ludicrously profitable. Look it up.

The number quoted for profitability is typically “gross margin” which does not include the extra costs I mentioned.

To clarify, since the edit window expired, I bet that Apple books a lot of their expenses as infrastructure investment or other things that don’t factor in as costs in those profitability calculations. Accounting wise they made a huge profit and then reinvested that in their company. But their customers only bought that hardware at such high prices because of the value add these investments provide.. so in Apple’s fairly unique case I’m not sure standard accounting practices give a good view of the situation.

Apple's net income (ie, profits) is 20x higher than Amazons.

If I can't have a custom name for your Home Operating System then that is a big fail to begin with. I have 2 Homes and man that is annoying having to say Google to activate it. They want branding and recognition that it is Google but I think that will hurt in the long run.

How would you prefer to activate the Homes, out of curiosity?

> have a custom name

I assume this means that they would like to train their own activation word. I could see someone re-using an activation word from another ecosystem, for example, for a consistent interface for less-savvy users; plenty of others might go for a more-familiar name, or a joke name like Hal.

My understanding as to why this isn't possible currently is that these companies pre-train the model and ship it on a ROM, rather than training it on-device, for privacy reasons (since this is the model that is "always listening"). However, I doubt most consumers are aware of this differentiation, and might appreciate the flexibility to set their own activation word.

Dobbie :)

GUPPI.

Ideally a custom codeword or name, but subjectively, names like "Alexa", "Siri" or words like "xbox" are easier to say as part of a command.

"Hey Cortana" isn't as bad as "Ok Google", but has a similar problem.

"xbox do the thing"

"alexa do the thing"

"hey siri do the thing"

"ok google do the thing"

There's something in the mechanics of saying "ok google" that makes it feel kind of awkward.

That's aside from the fact that having the brand name be a required part of it that rubs me the wrong way.

You can say Hey Google and it works the same. I only say it that way, I prefer it much better.

Calling it 'jarvis', obviously.

Yes. I'm especially annoyed at Google. I WILL NOT use a device that requires me to be an unpaid brand promoter. At least "Alexa" and "Siri" are actual names, or sound like names. A customizable activation word would be ideal, but under no circumstances can it be the brand name of the device's vendor. I won't have it.

I wonder: how far, quality wise, are open source alternatives for speech recognition and synthesis? Not saying this is the only feature required but it is a starting point. I have playing with Google APIs and they are great but would be greater to to not rely on an external API.

Not very good, unfortunately. There is pocketsphinx which sort of works but not nearly as well as the online ones, and some other research projects that are very hard to even set up.

A while ago there was an article on here about a free (but not open) recognition engine that worked on a raspberry pi, but I forgot the name - the founders were hanging around here back then, maybe they can chime in? I haven't had a chance to try it though.

Kaldi can produce excellent results, but is a pain to build, configure, and train.

Couldn't building, configuration, and training be done separately and the results distributed? Or is the data for training publicly available?

Sorry, but I feel that the community can do a big catch up in this area.

There was (or is) one called Mycroft which had promised big things but didn't deliver a compelling recognition and synthesis, although the recognition seems better than synthesis from what I have seen. They did open source much of the work at least initially. There is a video showing an example of how bad the UX was for a simple question asking about beans https://youtu.be/D5J7vVQNkCw.

This might be an ignorant question, but what is the difference between these systems and the fact that your phone's microphone is always listening for the same audio cues that set off these home devices? A microphone is always on you either way.

Don't take this the wrong way, I wouldn't be caught dead with one of these where I live, but I've always wondered why people can loathe these devices and yet still have smart phones. Genuine curiosity.

or laptops. or tvs. or cars. or public streets.

I recently reached the conclusion that Samsung SmartThings gear is junk, so I'm trying to figure out what to do next. Several of the sensors corroded inside the box (copper battery contact on PCB interacted with the metal in the battery casing), and many of the devices lose contact with the hub even though it's only 20 or 30 feet away.

Any suggestions for things like sensors, smart switches, etc.? What is the most open and reliable platform?

I've found Home Assistant [0] to be a solid project that works swimmingly on a raspberry Pi 3. For sensors, the Aeotec (by Aeon Labs) Z-Wave sensors [1] have been reliable for me. The Z-Wave stick I use is from Z-Wave.Me [2] and seems good, too.

[0] https://home-assistant.io [1] https://aeotec.com [2] https://www.z-wave.me/index.php?id=28

Looks really interesting. I'm not sure where the breakdown in my SmartThings setup is happening -- might be the hub or might be the remote devices.

Do you know if Home Assistant can interact directly with sensors, etc., without requiring the branded hub itself?

I haven't used a SmartThings hub, however their documentation [0] states that they're using Z-Wave, so if you go that route with Home Assistant, I'm willing to bet that it'll play nice with what you already have as far as sensors go.

[0] https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/204392790-...

I really like mine! But I live in an apartment and not a huge house.

I like it in concept. The app is very useful, etc. The issue I have had is that the hardware simply doesn't work.

Because your "things" are too far away from the hub, or just in general? Which things are you trying to hook it up with?

The "things" that don't work are roughly 30 feet from the hub. For some reason they become unavailable from time to time and stay that way for up to a week. During that time they don't function properly and it's not clear what to do to get them working again.

I've read that some people can get them working by resetting and re-installing each "thing" but that must be done each time it happens, which is really not practical.

Some gaps in this analysis:

1. Amazon is offering a lot of devices, but it can also lead to fragmentation of user experience. The article is already touting new Echo as good for music, Echo Show for TV, Echo Connect for communications etc. So now a user is supposed to buy all those devices? Isn't a single powerful device better than having multiple ones attacking different use cases[a]?

2. Not a single mention of "Search" - Google Home handily beats Amazon Echo there due to integration with Google Assistant. And I believe "general purpose search" would be a major category of usage of such devices.

[a] Unless the strategy is to throw the kitchen sink at home devices and see what sticks.

The Google Home has supported multi-room speakers for a while (if not since the beginning), being able to use any Cast-enabled speaker. So that's not an advantage Amazon has; rather it's catch-up.

Has Amazon changed it's approach and actually started publishing sold numbers of Echos?

It's always fun to compare sold-through vs. channel sales.

> Each of these companies want to create the standard by which home entertainment, home communications and home automation evolve.

Good luck expecting them to come up with a standard... First they'll push all kind of lock-in, and only years later will wake up to work on some standard.

My parents are buying a home in a new active adult community and the builders recently "partnered" with Amazon, and started advertising their houses as "Wi-Fi Certified" and "integrated" with Alexa.

I'm hoping it's just marketing fluff.

I cant wait for the first smart home virus. "Im sorry Frank, i cant let you out, until you transfered those Bitcoins."

Serious question: do any of these devices do local inference without streaming audio to some server somewhere?

Google Home is quite good though.

I have a google home and in 6 months it is definitely going to take over alexa

How so? What do you use your Google Home with that you cannot with an Amazon Echo? Curious as I have both and found little differences outside of answers to questions.

I had an Echo since shortly after it was introduced, and purchased a Home when it came out. I found quickly that the Home surpassed the Echo for most general inquiries. For all of my home automation, music playing and alarms, they are very comparable. The Echo seems to have slightly better speakers and microphone, but not enough to make me stick with it. I now have 3 Google Home's throughout the house and I find them much better at responding to natural language (e.g. "Hey Google, can dogs eat mango?").

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