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Comment by knowflux | Hacker News Reader

Acc to article, seems like it’s happening in established businesses like Retail. Maybe those old businesses are due for some consolidation?

In last earnings release, Bezos said he’s doubling down on Alexa, which I presume includes increased hiring.

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Voice search is already huge and I imagine it may be even bigger. I see Amazon as a threat to Google in this area.

It's always astounded me how a technology change can kill a company overnight. Google almost died with searches going mobile but somehow bought Android and survived but killed BlackBerry. Now voice search is a risk.

That's a bit revisionist.

Google saw a tiny but steady rise in mobile searches and realized they needed to become mobile focused. They acquired a startup called Danger Inc. which brought in Andy Rubin who helped birth their Android efforts.

Rubin saw just how good the iPhone was then threw out their work to start from scratch [1] before they eventually put out their first device: the Android G1. Steve Jobs was furious at the similarities with the iPhone because he had gotten firm promises Google would not copy the iPhone in their phone efforts. Eventually, Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple's board when it was clear both companies would be competing head on in mobile.

[1] https://amp.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-android-founde...

Google did not buy Danger. They bought Android which was started by ex Danger founder Andy Rubin. Microsoft bought Danger and released an awful device after doing so. I had to add that last bit.

On that bit of history, I stand corrected.

Thanks for pointing it out.

I could see these devices given way free as some kind of set-top+assistant if you buy our TV service.

Heck, I've had power companies offering google home for free if I select a green energy provider.

> Amazon as a threat to Google in this area.

LOL. That is like saying Apple (iPhones) are a threat to Google (Android) when it was Apple that first brought touch-based smartphones to market.

You probably meant: "Google is a threat to Amazon in this area" because Amazon invented and still dominates the smart speaker category.

In other words, Google didn't know a market existed for such devices until Amazon created a market for them.

"Amazon's dominance in the emerging area of voice search is a threat to Google's general dominance in search." (Like the Apple's iPhone platform is a threat to Google, which Google is attempting to counter by promoting Android.)

Amazon might have been the first to launch a dedicated device that can do voice search but Google was doing it(on Android) before such a device was launched by amazon.

Right, but were their efforts successful? That's the main difference here, bringing a new product to market successfully.

Long before voice assistants/search became a thing with smart phones there was Google 411 ... which no one remembers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411

Yes, they had been successful with voice search long before Alexa ever came out, and continue to do it well. Google is THE search giant, you'd have to be acting intentionally obtuse to not understand his point.

https://searchengineland.com/google-reveals-20-percent-queri...

I'd guess that 20% of Google's mobile queries in 2016 are a few orders of magnitude larger than Amazon's total voice search queries, effectively making Amazon's voice queries a drop in the ocean.

Looks like people are completely ignoring the context of my response.

The context in the grandparent was Alexa (i.e. voice search at home) which is much much narrower than voice search in general.

Here's an excerpt of Jeff Bezos' statement regarding doubling down on Alexa so its clearer this is not about voice search in general or on smartphones but on their smart home devices using Alexa:

“We’ve reached an important point where other companies and developers are accelerating adoption of Alexa. There are now over 30,000 skills from outside developers, customers can control more than 4,000 smart home devices from 1,200 unique brands with Alexa, and we’re seeing strong response to our new far-field voice kit for manufacturers. Much more to come and a huge thank you to our customers and partners,"

https://mashable.com/2018/02/01/amazon-earnings-2017-alexa-j...

That is like saying Apple (iPhones) are a threat to Google (Android) when it was Apple that first brought touch-based smartphones to market.

Palm and Microsoft (through OEMs) both released touch-based smartphones years before the iPhone. They were very popular in the military, government, and legal markets, though a distant #2 and #3 to Blackberry (which did not release a touch-capable device until after the iPhone).

Do you have links to back up your claim? Palm's first touch screen smartphone effort was released in 2009 [0]. Not that it matters considering the original discussion was Google vs Apple.

Anyway, PDAs were a different device category from smartphones and many of them required a stylus for input like the HP iPAQ which ran Windows Pocket PC.

IIRC, the iPhone keynote talked about how they did away with the stylus because people frequently lost them so I wouldn't equate stylus-input PDAs with finger-input smartphones even though both device categories technically use touch-screens.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

Your link doesn't disprove my point. Did the LG Prada run Windows Mobile/Phone, Palm webOS or any mainstream OS for smartphones?

That’s a silly question since it predates most of those operating system it was a smartphone it’s like saying that the iPhone didn’t run a mainstream operating system same goes for Android which is true when they came out they weren’t mainstream Symbian was the closest thing to mainstream at the time.

> > Voice search is already huge and I imagine it may be even bigger. I see Amazon as a threat to Google in this area.

> LOL. That is like saying Apple (iPhones) are a threat to Google (Android) when it was Apple that first brought touch-based smartphones to market.

Google brought voice search to the market long before Alexa.

It's true that Google was later than Amazon in incorporating voice search into the smart speaker form factor, which would be relevant if GP had identified the area of concern as “smart speakers” rather than “voice search”.

It's not even about a product category. It's about control of the surface area of interfaces people use. Interfaces that aggregate other services often hang poorly, but if you can build one people seek to use, you can build a brand (a name bound to positive connotations), which becomes a durable and valuable position to control. Mental real-estate in mass awareness is hard-won.

Voice control today is somewhere between gimmick and strictly dominant, depending on the situation and provider. If you consider the trends of interface design from line console to GUI to touch, each used newly-sophisticated tech to become more broadly accessible. With this broadening the stakes go up. I think that explains the proliferation of speaker chatbot products; they are just one front in a larger competition for that space people interact with directly. That particular front may or may not turn out to matter in the long run. Concurrent battle sites are car integrations and streaming devices/USB-sticks for TV's. This is why these same companies keep showing up to the same battlefronts with more or less equivalent strategies (semi-shiny new interface tech that happens to funnel you into their marketplace regime); they all want to be your concierge at the ready, in order to steer economic activity.

Surveys show that Alexa is being used for basic Siri 1.0 searches ("What's the weather","Play x on Pandora", timers, alarms, novelty questions) and little else. Few people have activated a skill or ordered something. A graphical user interface is going to be a vastly richer and more useful interactive experience for a very long time.

> Few people have activated a skill or ordered something.

As far as I know, I cannot enable a skill on my echo dot itself. I have to do it through the app. This is friction that I don't need to tell you is bad for engagement. I wager Amazon's first mover advantage is very much over stated.

If you know the exact skill, you can just say “Enable Jeopardy skill”.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

I don't mind that so much. My issue with skills is that there is a very limited number of incantations that I can keep in my head to summon the correct behavior from Alexa.

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