UPDATED 13:42 EDT / JANUARY 22 2018

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Amazon’s smartphone jinx is AI voice competitors’ juju

How many artificial intelligence voice assistants are too many? Do people wish to manage all of their “internet of things” connected devices — TVs, speakers, lights, locks, etc. — with the same familiar digital chum? If they do, the consumer IoT market may tilt toward the company with the best-liked assistant on the most used device. In other words, Amazon.com Inc. might lose its enviable position in voice if it doesn’t break its smartphone jinx.

“Everyone is going after Amazon,” said Ken Yeung, former reporter for VentureBeat Inc. and mentor at Orange Fab, a platform that connects startups and corporations. Yeung spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during an interview at the Samsung Developer Conference last October in San Francisco. 

Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant powers Echo, its smart home speaker scrawled on many a gift list last holiday season. Echo now enjoys about 71 percent of smart-speaker market share, according to analysts. Alexa is integrated in more than 4,000 smart-home devices spanning 1,200 brands, according to Steve Rabuchin, Amazon’s vice president of Alexa Voice Service and Alexa Skills. That widespread of devices gives Amazon a quantitative advantage in consumer IoT. However, don’t lots of consumers see their smartphone as a crash pad for their AI assistant?

Competitors like Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd seem to think so; the company’s built its AI assistant Bixby 2.0 into the hardware of its latest Galaxy models. Inquire about Amazon-brand phones and one hears little but foreign-market rumors rustling in corners of the internet. Can a cart full of dimmer switches and thermostats punch up to the mighty smartphone?

Granted, that is a stingy description of Amazon’s and partners’ smart device inventory.

Watch the complete video interview with Ken Yeung below:

Alexa hangs up on smartphones

In addition to Echo, there are now a slew of Alexa-integrated devices that do much more than set mood lighting on command. Echo Show combines a smart speaker with a camera and touchscreen, so users can make video calls, watch Amazon Prime Video, shop Amazon and more.

Echo Connect can turn any Alexa device into a landline phone. Users set up their home phone numbers (assuming they have them — iffy at best) so they can make and receive calls through the smart speaker.

If this sounds like Amazon is trying to sell consumers on Alexa as a feasible alternative to smartphones, that’s because it is. The company’s made no bones about its ambition to cut in on smartphones’ and apps’ turf with simpler voice-summoned Alexa skills. “We don’t want to replicate the multilevel, multilayer touch actions that apps do. We want to be able to mimic voice by touch. It’s a different paradigm,” said Miriam Daniel, Amazon’s head of product management for Alexa, as quoted by Fast Company. “If you design for touch and you voice-enable, it’s very onerous. If you design for voice, which is very simple, and you touch-enable, you actually simplify touch as well.”

Thus far, iPhones and Galaxies aren’t hurtling into dumpsters across the land. The fact is that people are addicted to their mobile phones because of their mobility. At-home devices will only make it so far against mobile phones — commercially and geographically. Amazon has attempted to make up for its lack of a proprietary smartphone with Alexa integration on the HTC U11 flagship phone. That means users just say, “Alexa”; the voice assistant lives on the phone natively, so there isn’t anything to download or install (an Alexa app is available on Android and iOS phones). Even so, some see this as a half-hearted handoff from a company that could easily whip up a phone of its own.

“Alexa is never going to achieve true first-party status and integration on a third-party smartphone,” said Jan Dawson, founder of Jackdaw Research, as quoted by Wired.

AI learns through iteration. Without capturing smartphone interactions, Alexa misses out big time on opportunities to learn from data and users’ behavior.

Amazon’s 2014 release of its Fire smartphone ended in embarrassment for the company. “Amazon failed spectacularly at selling an overstuffed, overpriced, 3D-for-some-reason smartphone,” Brian Barrett wrote in Wired last July. “But the stakes for Amazon are too high not to give it another shot — especially if it can avoid its earlier mistakes,” he wrote, adding that Amazon Prime provides an ideal marketplace for selling an Amazon smartphone.

Google Assistant has the lead in smartphone installs with 46 percent, which is projected to exceed 60 percent by 2022, according to Strategy Analytics Inc. It’s the default AI assistant on Google LLC’s flagship Pixel phone.

Race to integrate

Samsung’s large hardware footprint — smartphones, appliances and its Artik interoperable IoT modules, etc. — allow Bixby to sink its teeth deep into the company’s consumer IoT, according to James Stansberry (pictured), senior vice president and general manager, ARTIK IoT, at Samsung Electronics America, Inc.

The company is opening its IoT portfolio to more outside integrations. “Being a maker of devices and then having this open Artik platform I believe is going to position Samsung in a very unique way in IoT — not just for our own products, but for people to interact with our products and create new services,” Stansberry told theCUBE.

Watch the complete video interview with James Stransberry below:

One such integration with The Weather Co., which IBM Corp. acquired in 2015, shows what kind of everyday experiences integrated IoT can deliver.

One of the reasons IBM acquired it is because “… we have this fantastic infrastructure, this IoT infrastructure ingesting large amounts of data, processing it, and then serving it back out to consumers at scale, globally,” said Domenic Venuto, general manager of the Consumer Division and Watson advertising, The Weather Channel, an IBM Business.

“We’re one of the initial partners for the Made for Samsung program,” he told theCUBE. The Weather Channel app for Samsung Galaxy phones integrated with the calendar can alert travelers to get an early start based on weather and traffic conditions, for example.

Perhaps Samsung’s and others’ early start in smartphones will help them compete with Alexa in streamlined consumer IoT.

Watch the complete video interview with Domenic Venuto below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Samsung Developer Conference:

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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