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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