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

Amazon gains a short-lived edge over Google. 

• Amazon is enabling its skills to talk to one another in a move that will greatly enhance the functionality and appeal of Alexa over its rivals unless they immediately follow suit.
• I suspect that Google’s hardware PR people will now be frantically editing the keynotes and presentations set for next Tuesday (October 9^th) to include something around this.
• Amazon’s Skill Connections is a new ability that allows developers to include the functionality of other developer’s skills when writing to the platform.
• An example of this would be an airline check-in skill being able to print a boarding pass after check-in by accessing another developer’s printer skill.
• The airline skill could simply ask the user if he would like to print his boarding pass after checking in with a simple yes resulting in the print out being made.
• This is exactly the kind of functionality that RFM looks for in a digital ecosystem when it is assessing how well that ecosystem is set up to compete with its services in the long-term.
• Specifically, this refers to RFM’s Law of Robotics No. 5: data sharing on the device, which assesses how well the Digital Life services of an ecosystem can share data on the device.
• I think that this is a key attribute towards making services deeper, richer and more intuitive and will soon become a point of differentiation.
• At the moment, this Amazon’s ability is limited to 5 functionalities and remains in developer preview, but the intent is there to take this much further.
• Currently, the functionalities available are print an image, webpage or PDF enabled by HP, make a restaurant reservation enabled by OpenTable and ride-hailing enabled by Uber.
• Effectively what Amazon is enabling is an open API to which developers can publish their abilities to which other developers can access with their own skills.
• If this works seamlessly, then it is easy to see how Alexa’s (and any other assistant’s) functionality can be drastically improved.
• This is why I am certain that Google is already working on enabling this for the assistant which may be hurriedly announced next week.
• Consequently, I don’t think that this will put Amazon ahead for very long, meaning that this is unlikely to close the performance gap to Google.
• On pure performance, the Google Assistant remains way ahead of Amazon and given that Google Assistant generates a lot more traffic (see here), I see the gap between the two widening from here.
• This is why I still think that Google has the advantage over Amazon in the smart home leading to its eventual ouster.
• The one area where I think Google has no chance is in shopping, but Amazon Prime households are affluent enough to have two assistants.
• Furthermore, because Amazon gives away the Echo Dash Wand, there is no reason why Prime households cannot use Alexa for shopping and Google for everything else.
• I am warming up to Google once again mainly because it is likely to escape the most unscathed from the current privacy-related backlash 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.