For a generation, there has been a “Highlander”-style battle between the tech giants to be the phone in your pocket. The assumption has been that, since people will not carry more than one phone, the battle for presence in your pocket is a battle to the death.
The same assumption applied to the battle for the living room, at least when that was expected to center on a TV. The newest race at home, kicked off by the sleeper success of the Amazon Echo, suggests that things might not be quite so zero sum in the brewing home wars.
Unlike phones and TVs, there’s no reason a given house can’t have many different smart agents, connected via many different microphone and speaker systems tucked away in various corners of their house. This has a few implications for how the ecosystem might develop. In particular, it should put more power in the hands of application developers.
It’s plausible that in a few years I will have three or four different voice-enabled systems in my house with overlapping but distinct functionalities. I expect that my Sonos system will be upgraded with microphones so that I can play high-quality music throughout my house via voice command. I expect to have some form of my current Echo that is likely better at purchasing things from Amazon than the current version. I expect that my current Apple TV will get smarter and I will use Siri, along with possibly Echo, for more media requests. And, of course, I would be shocked if Google wasn’t in the mix, though it is interesting that unlike the other services mentioned, I am not precisely sure what it will do for me. Perhaps it will be more focused on mail and calendar.
All of these companies are capable of producing the hardware. The interesting part is that with cheap-enough devices, I don’t see why any of them would cede presence in the home and the front-end service to their competitors. While there might be a return on scale in owning all the services, none of the companies will be able to beat the others at what they’re best at. And the services won’t work on the other platforms. So it’ll be a world where they can all take their own end-to-end slice of the pie.
This also suggests that the optimal business strategy for the devices is going to be—with the right privacy controls—developer-friendly, open APIs.
Take a company like Uber, which might want to let people order cars with voice commands. Uber is unlikely to produce its own hardware in the home to offer that feature. If there were only one option of smart agent in a home, that platform owner would exert a lot of pricing power on Uber. The person that owned the microphone and speaker at home would get to define pricing and policy terms. Uber would need to snap to if it wanted to be involved—or else its competitor would.
But in a world where there are several winners in the home who have their microphones, presence detectors, and maybe cameras, broadly deployed, developers have more power. All of a sudden there are many routes to distribution.
In a world like that, the best strategy for platforms is openness. If you want developers on your platform, you need to compete by being friendly to them and giving them a good foundation on which to build.
This is very different than the situation developers have become accustomed to in the last 10 years.
To be sure, the biggest challenge with highly open systems in the home is privacy and security. The stakes are high for devices in the home, and the platform owners will have to work hard to keep the trust of their users. I believe that’s compatible with an open-home platform.
At the end of the day, I am a huge fan of the Echo—we have five at home—and a big believer that passive voice (listening in the background) in the home is a major departure from phone-based Siri and Google Now. I also know it is very early. But my bet is that anyone who is looking at this contest as the next iteration of the phone wars is going to be way off the mark. This is going to be something new.
With the Amazon Echo becoming a clear hit, and Google along with many other technology companies in hot pursuit creating competitors, it seems likely that voice control at home will likely become a reality for many soon.
Personally, I can’t wait.