Tech Convergence Will Spur Demand for New ADAS Technology

Smart speakers are still pretty dumb — here’s what needs to happen



If it's easier to interact, it's easier to transact. --Ed.




by Sachin Maini

Big untapped opportunities for Amazon Echo and Google Home in health and personal safety

Smart speakers could be much more than just music, weather, and the news

It’s been four years since Amazon.com’s Echo first hit the market, and so far smart speakers haven’t amounted to much more than glorified radios that can control the lights.

At the very least, these devices were supposed to have changed the way we shop. But a damning report in The Information recently revealed that of the 50 million owners of an Alexa-enabled device, only 2% have used their voice to make a purchase even once — and of those, only 10% made a second purchase. Study after study shows that people continue to use smart speakers primarily for the basics: music, weather, and the news.

While smart speakers are popular and entertaining, at the end of the day they just aren’t that useful. They’re still awkward to interact with, they can’t handle complexity very well, and features with a lot of potential, like push notifications, are still in a nascent stage. As a result, each of the major technology companies in the market —Amazon AMZN, +0.09% Google GOOG, +0.03% GOOGL, +1.47% and Apple AAPL, -0.01% in the US, and Baidu BIDU, +1.86% Alibaba BABA, +0.14% and Tencent 0700, +0.81% TCEHY, +0.38% in China — have been competing on either price or sound quality.

That leaves us with a fiercely competitive market full of devices that all pretty much do the same thing: not very much.

Home-security systems leave a lot to be desired

These devices can also do a lot more to help us to stay safe, get the right information in a crisis, and respond more effectively to emergencies. 

Right now, Google and Amazon are gearing up to battle over the $50 billion home security market. Both companies have launched a suite of cameras, doorbells, and motion sensors with the smart speaker as the hub. The offerings, however, leave a lot to be desired. The competitive focus has been on re-creating what the existing security equipment companies already do, at the cost of developing new approaches based on what’s natural and intuitive to voice.

That’s a missed opportunity because voice-based communication can be very effective in communicating immediate and important information. It makes more sense for a smart speaker to verbally announce when a person is at the front door than to get an alert on your phone. There could even be a security mode activated by a specific wake-word such as “Help” or “Danger” which would apply a different set of privacy practices, triggering automatic recording and streamlined communication with emergency services.

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