[awgneo]

I tried Alexa a month ago and gave up on it within a week. Digital assistants fall flat in walled gardens. It was clear during this week that Alexa only worked well with Amazon services, which were always subpar. Google search? Nope. Support for Chromecast? Nope. Support for Instacart? Nope. It was basically a perverse link to the Amazon-only supply chain.

Google's assistant might be striving for more openness, but I don't have high hopes here either; at least until a formal development kit is released. Given that Google won't be able to use its same tried and true ad revenue strategy, we can expect them to offload voice requests to the highest bidder or prefer Google services above all else. This is another perverse link into Google's realm of anti-privacy; but worse, because they won't be able to do ads along the side. The responses will be the ads.

All of this to say that all of these locked down digital assistants will fail until a company truly approaches it from an open and wholistic perspective, and one that doesn't rely upon troves of private data. These devices may sell well this year, but so did digital picture frames. How many of those are still in use?

[danvasquez29]

I'm not really sure why you think it's Amazon only or a walled garden. I have limited experience with it but from the research I've done thus far it seems to have a fairly robust development platform.

I'm under the impression that if it feels Amazon-only it's because of a failure of companies and devs to take advantage of the platform, not a failure of the platform itself. For example the Google services you're asking about, is that Amazon's fault or has Google not taken the time to develop that app because they're focusing on their own product?

I've used my echo dot most often with 3rd party services so far (daily briefing integrations, capital one, yahoo fantasy football).

[awgneo]

I agree with this perspective. However, you have to wonder why we don't have more Alexa skills in the platform. Here are a couple of my thoughts.

1. They require you to say "Alexa, tell <app_name> to <do_something>"; This pushes all 3rd party services one level deeper.

2. Amazon competes with too many companies and services these days. Instacart devs won't want to work on a skill within a platform that is itself is a competitor.

[danvasquez29]

#1 does get annoying. I think it does make the experience a little more jarring having to use the same sentence structure for each question. For example, if I want an update on my fantasy football team, I have to say "Alexa, ask yahoo fantasy football"... this is weird and not natural. In normal conversation, I would say "ask yahoo", which isn't specific enough, or skip right to "alexa what's going on with my fantasy team?" since I only have the one team and one integration capable of dealing with fantasy sports.

#2 I agree is an issue. I wonder if with the current environment any independent would be allowed to gain traction, or would the competitors lock them out of services that users find mandatory (amazon shopping lists, google search, apple music, etc).

[dharma1]

Plus if you have a million skills on the platform, the namespace for reasonable things will fill up pretty quick, consider you evoke each skill by the app name

[sharemywin]

I agree 100% #2.

[Eridrus]

I don't recall where I saw it, but I recall reading a comment from Google saying they weren't planning on having "Apps for Home" where the voice commands were things you installed like on Android/Echo, but were keeping it locked down and working with partners for the foreseeable future.

Alexa is actually not a walled garden at all; skills are almost entirely separated from each other, and I think that will be one of the biggest problems though. My gut says that the reason language is convenient is that it allows for things to be implicit rather than explicit and I expect the voice assistants that will be most useful are the ones that can best understand this context, which will require deeper integration.

[KirinDave]

> I don't recall where I saw it, but I recall reading a comment from Google saying they weren't planning on having "Apps for Home" where the voice commands were things you installed like on Android/Echo, but were keeping it locked down and working with partners for the foreseeable future.

Except that: https://developers.google.com/actions/

OFC partner negotiations will need to take place in this; this is a new field with massive implications for customer security and caution and oversight _should_ be the watchword. Imagine the open ecosystem model for this and the disasters it could bring.

But the door to the ecosystem is plainly marked now and the rules are posted over the queue. You can do it today.

[Eridrus]

Ok, I went and found what I'd read: http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/8/13878444/google-home-devel...

> The first and most important difference is that Google is not going to create an “Action Store” where users can select which ones they want and “install” them on Google Home. Instead, Google itself is going to approve all the keywords that developers want to use to invoke their actions and make them all available to everybody.

> That effectively means that actions will be curated by Google (like an app store), but users won’t have to install anything before using them (like the web). “It's not a direct analog to any existing ecosystem,” says Jason Douglas, director for actions on Google.

That article does specify that there will be a hand-off to 3rd party systems, rather than Google orchestrating everything, but it still sounds quite tightly constrained and I think that if the plan is to have things all work nicely together and not be silos, then tighter integration with more Google control will be the name of the game.

[g00gler]

Even explicit instructions don't work for some reason.

With Google voice assistant I can't say "look up the New York Giants score then text it to Phil"

I don't recall reading that functionality in the Alexa docs, either.

Seems natural and logical to me.

* I had to specify New York Giants because Google always brings up the SF Giants if I don't

[Ajedi32]

> Google's assistant might be striving for more openness, but I don't have high hopes here either; at least until a formal development kit is released.

But they have released one? https://developers.google.com/actions/

[danso]

That's weird, I use my Alexa almost entirely to connect to Spotify, Google Calendar, and TuneIn (for radio stations). I never use Amazon services through it except music and the occasional Alexa-based sale.

[jmuguy]

I agree, I own two of them. I use them to play music from Spotify and set timers (which is actually very helpful, and makes me realize how lazy I am).

However, I get an email once a week from Amazon with "whats new" on Alexa. Its always a few useless things like holiday trivia and then some garbage you can order from Amazon. It was a ground breaking device, but its clearly meant to just be another gateway to Amazon's weird, limited ecosystem.

[extra88]

> Given that Google won't be able to use its same tried and true ad revenue strategy

Is there a technical reason why they couldn't play an audio ad after a response based on what you asked for and your account history? It seems to me that voice UIs, like mobile UIs, have constraints on the quantity of ads but don't make them impossible. These constraints, by reducing the ad space supply, can also drive up the price for said space, especially when you consider the audience for an audio ad is A) captive and B) not restricted to a single individual.

[shostack]

I have this hope that Google will shift to selling hardware and services and ween itself off search revenue gradually such that people pay them for their AI directly or indirectly.

This would make users the customers and better align incentives letting them do things like put user privacy first.

[vthallam]

Google opened up the assistant platform where you can create 'Actions' similar to skills on Amazon. It's only a matter of time, Google Assistant supersedes in 3rd party integrations.

[iamcasen]

Please checkout Hound/Houndify https://houndify.com

I used to work there, and I can definitely say that are working hard and fast at becoming a non-walled-garden platform for voice.

The voice capabilities are still lightyears beyond Siri/Alexa, but they have spent more time focusing on big partnerships than the fickle user facing market.

I hope they make some moves very soon, because frankly I believe their tech is truly superior.

[tomcart]

Not tried google home, but Spotify support on the Echo is pretty good - aside from the ability to create an on the go playlist (please add this!) its actually working really well for me.