Google vs. Amazon – Battle for the smart home pt. X

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Good ideas still depend on AI.

• Amazon has all the right ideas when it comes to improving the user experience with Alexa but the real decider is almost certain to be the quality of the AI that drives the assistant.
• Amazon is trialling a new API which combined with its own AI, could make using Alexa to get stuff done much easier and more fun for the user.
• One of the big problems with Alexa today is that the user has to give a series of specific commands in a specific order in to get the desired result.
• Furthermore, to use specific skills, the user has to open the skill, execute the command and then close it again very much like one does on a PC, tablet or smartphone.
• This has long had a substantial and deleterious impact on the quality of the user experience offered by Alexa, and in many cases, it is simply easier for the user to flip the switch himself.
• Amazon has debuted a new API called CanFulfillIntentRequest which is an API to which developers can publish the abilities of the skills they have created.
• This gives Alexa a database from which to search when it is looking for a particular ability with which to address a request.
• This potentially offers a big improvement in the user experience as the user should not have to individually invoke each skill each time resulting in a more seamless experience.
• There are two immediate problems:
  • First, the user will have had to manually enabled beforehand all of the skills that he wants to use.
  • This means that the user has to be aware of the skill before Alexa can make use of it for each user.
  • Hence, the seamless addition of skills that user was not even aware of will not be possible in this version.
  • Second, this “skill searching” will only be as good as the AI that is matching the request to the relevant skill.
  • This is likely to be a problem as understanding and interpreting natural language is not Amazon’s strong suit.
  • Furthermore, RFM rates Amazon’s AI way behind Google meaning that its ability to match requests to skills is also not likely to be that good.
• The net result is that this is an important step forward for the user experience when interacting with Alexa.
• Amazon has got the right ideas when it comes to improving the user experience with Alexa, but the outcome will depend on how well Amazon can improve its AI to match the performance of Google Assistant.
• On that front, I still think that Google Assistant will win the battle for the smart home (see here), leaving Amazon with the shopping piece as this is a functionality that Google can quickly emulate.
• I am warming up to Google once again mainly because it is likely to escape the most unscathed from the current privacy related back lash and hence should outperform its peers.
• That being said, privacy advocate Apple is likely to fare the best of all while the current storm rages.