Amazon AWS – Brain game

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Amazon is stepping up its efforts in the coming battle of the brains. 

• Amazon is following its competitors by announcing a series of services based on its AI research but the performance of Echo makes me think that there is still an awful lot of work to do.
• The headline of the AWS re:invent conference was the launch of three new services based on the AI work that it has done to date.
  • First: Amazon Recoknition.
  • This is a service that provides image and facial recognition as well as being able to assess the mood of the subject as well as detect glasses and so on.
  • Second: Amazon Polly.
  • This is a text to speech service that takes text input and returns an MP3 stream that sounds like a real conversation rather than a mechanical expression of just words.
  • Amazon Lex
  • This is a service that provides natural language understanding and automatic speech recognition.
  • It is also the system that powers the speech recognition of the Alexa digital assistant in this regard it performs reasonably well.
  • It is in Alexa’s ability to understand context, multi part enquiries and respond to enquiries that it falls short.
• These launches have also gone hand in hand with a new initiative with Intel where Intel will launch a reference design for a home speaker that includes the Alexa digital assistant.
• This is a good idea because at this early stage all the digital assistants need to collect as much data as possible in order to improve.
• Hence, I expect that there will be a slew of devices that use Alexa for their brain with a range of designs, capabilities and price points.
• I would not be surprised to see Google follow suit in this strategy with Google Assistant where, once again (see here), it will have the advantage.
• This is because I have long believed that Google Assistant is vastly superior to anything else in terms if the user experience that it offers and the usefulness of its responses.
• Consequently, if Google executes well and users like its product, it should be able to encourage manufacturers to deploy its digital assistant rather than Amazon’s.
• Once again Google’s success (just like Pixel) is hinging on execution and only time will tell whether the recent re-organisation has been successful in solving Google’s historical problems in this area.
• I continue to think that Alphabet is pricing in success in most of its endeavours and so prefer Microsoft, Tencent and Baidu from an investment perspective.