During this year’s edition of CES, Amazon proved that its smart assistant Alexa is more popular than Apple’s Siri. Amazon also proved that other companies are lagging behind it when it comes to voice-based computing.
Experts believe that for companies like Apple the war is lost since they have no time to catch up.
This year, CES attendees unveiled a series of products that are based on Amazon’s Alexa. For instance, the smart assistant was embedded in smart glasses, Windows PCs, Toyota cars, and smart home devices.
Nearly all gizmos showcased at 2018 CES were Alexa-powered, which means that Amazon plays a huge part in how people interact with technology. Apple’s Siri, on the other hand, was not even mentioned in the conversations.
Yet, Alexa hasn’t become so popular overnight. It took Amazon years to build the product and convince users of its usefulness. Alexa become increasingly popular when it was included in Amazon’s Echo smart speakers.
Amazon’s Smart Assistant Alexa Growing More Popular
As of recently, the e-commerce giant unveiled a cheaper Echo model which encouraged many users to buy the products and have Alexa installed in their homes.
- Because Amazon was able to mix a pioneering concept with low prices, Alexa was very hard to compete against.
- As a result, Amazon sold millions of units and won two-thirds of the smart assistant market. Even Google was left behind.
Amazon’s success lured in more developers who enriched Alexa with countless new apps helping it to get better in time. This led to another consequence: more and more device makers want their products to sport Alexa as a smart assistant.
Apple plans to launch a device that will mimic Echo in the coming months: the HomePod. But Apple’s smart speaker will miss many of Echo’s features and apps. This is mainly because Apple has placed many restrictions on Siri developers and the voice assistant cannot run on non-Apple products.
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