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Comment by forkLding | Hacker News Reader

Is there a reason for why major tech companies are heavily pushing their smart speakers? Their seems to be a lot more marketing push going on than when they were pushing out new phones/tablets/hardware etc in the past (Amazon fire, Google Pixelbook, Google Chromecast, Amazon Roku etc.)

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A few reasons come to mind:

- landgrab. You're very unlikely to have more than one smart speaker system in your phone, so once you've got an Alexa, you'll probably pick up some Alexa Dots rather than get a Google Home. This applies to an entire household in the way that even cellphone choices don't.

- lock-in. The web is all pesky and open, whereas these voice interface platforms are perfectly locked in for ultimate profit. And you can't get the web on them! Ideal.

I think it's because it helps the big tech companies sell more stuff later on.

If you have a smart speaker, you are probably more likely to be a Prime member, Spotify subscriber, and make purchases with Amazon or Google Express via the speaker.

Passive data collection on a massive scale

This is the correct interpretation: Google and Amazon thrive on data.

Probably for a similar reason that they push their own app stores. You get used to using something, depend on it. After the lock-in period, they are in a much better position to offer you new services that you simply can't refuse.

Machine learning.

More data = more learning. Even bad data is valuable.

It's how Google keeps Google Voice and Gmail free.

Voice interfaces have huge potential. I think the potential for a truly amazing voice interface / AI (think JARVIS from Iron Man) outweighs the potential of hardware.

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