Amazon started by selling its first-gen Echos when voice assistants could still be somewhat unreliable without angering customers. Now look back on this path to success, and see if you can imagine any other company emulating it. Only Amazon is so willing to sell hardware at a loss for the promise of subscription and data profits down the line. Amazon invested resources in making its smart assistant connect outside of Echos, and I'm sure the third parties involved saw the value of being promoted on Amazon as an Alexa partner for bigger sales. As a result, it was thanks to "extremely low priced Echo products" that the assistant became smarter over time.Īmazon then followed up by "partnering with numerous smart home device makers" to make Alexa have more practical uses within the home. "Amazon had to push very hard and offer very competitively priced products in order to increase hardware adoption and ultimately Alexa usage," Ubrani told me.
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Source: Joe Maring / Android Central (Image credit: Source: Joe Maring / Android Central)Īlexa's success certainly wasn't inevitable.
Still, many iPhone users likely only used Siri for jokes and simple requests once the novelty wore off, limiting Apple's potential to grow. Both Apple and Amazon save and study your commands to improve their assistants' intelligence. While Siri was always an optional interface behind a touchscreen, Echo devices required voice commands.īy "appealing to early adopters first, who generally have higher tolerance level for trial and error," Amazon gained practical knowledge of how its customers voiced commands for information, Milanesi explained.
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"Amazon leaned into voice and gave users no choice but to figure out how to interact with Alexa in an environment, the home, which is much less complex to figure out than the open world," Carolina Milanesi, Principal Analyst at Creative Strategies, told me. Outlandish assistants like Astro make us more likely to accept "regular" data-collecting devices like the Echo. Of course, when Alexa launched in 2014, it didn't have any particular advantages over Siri, intelligence-wise. But by pushing our mental boundaries of what is "too much Alexa" in our lives - any device that follows us around or outside the home - Amazon made us more likely to accept an always-listening Alexa in one spot as more natural, in the form of an Echo Dot or Show. Most people aren't buying Echo Frames either, and the always-listening Amazon Halo freaked people out. I personally think Amazon jumped the shark with its $1,000 Roomba assistant, but it shouldn't put a dent in Alexa's popularity one bit.