Google Assistant Just Kicked Alexa’s Ass. And it Doesn’t Matter (Premium)

There are over 100 million Amazon Alexa-powered devices out in the world. But there are ten times as many Google Assistant-powered devices.

Game over?

No, not exactly. In fact, if this is where your head is at, you’re thinking about this all wrong.

In this evolving world of digital platforms, the winner-takes-all platform wars of old---marked by Windows vs. Mac and Android vs. iPhone most obviously---have given way to a more heterogeneous reality here in the 21st century. And when it comes to digital assistants, or what I call ambient computing, Amazon’s and Google’s entries both matter. To users. To home integration and standalone device makers. And to all third-party services.

So, too, do a small group of B-teamers that includes Samsung Bixby and Apple Siri, both of which will continue to wield some power---ensuring a decent level of compatibility with third-party services, but not third-party hardware---thanks to their mobile user bases. But Microsoft’s Cortana, the long-shot fifth major player here, is down for the count.

We don’t typically see a four-way race in any digital market, and one might logically expect the bottom two to eventually fail. But I think the Bixby and Siri entries here are unique, holdovers from those firms’ dominance in the biggest digital platform, smartphones, and will sustain. That said, the big two---and it’s not even close---are Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. And either is a safe bet for anyone looking to add smart capabilities to their homes, cars, or elsewhere in their lives.

I like this heterogeneous world a lot. You can see it in Microsoft’s embrace of what were previously competing platforms like Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. It makes portability---the ability to move from one ecosystem or platform to another---possible and, in many cases, seamlessly non-sticky. And it frees us as users from the worry that we may have wasted time, money, and effort investing in the wrong choice. (Sorry, Cortana fans.)

That this market is scaling to approach that of smartphones is interesting too. There are well over a billion users of digital assistants today given the publicly-disclosed numbers from Amazon and Google, and possibly north of 1.5 billion if you include usage in the second- and third-tier assistants. That’s as a big as the PC user base, and it only took a quick few years to get there thanks to the ubiquitous nature of mobile. And I expect it to eventually surpass the smartphone user base because so many people will be using this technology at home, including children who are too young to own their own smartphones. Eventually, the necessary hardware will simply be built into everything---our homes, our cars, our workplace, and our public spaces---and the experience will become truly seamless.

Yes, voice interactions can be annoying to those around us when we’re out in the world---I always think of those terrible walkie-talkie-like cell phones from a decade or...

Gain unlimited access to Premium articles.

With technology shaping our everyday lives, how could we not dig deeper?

Thurrott Premium delivers an honest and thorough perspective about the technologies we use and rely on everyday. Discover deeper content as a Premium member.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC