[dtien]

Apple (and Google) really dropped the ball on the connected Home 'smartbox' that Amazon popularized with Alexa.

We received one as a gift this past Christmas, and I'm now a full believer in this tech after being a very big skeptic during the first couple years of Alexa's existence. Add to the fact, that we primarily use it as a smart connected radio, and the benefits are still beyond clear to me.

Essentially, you've now opened up the possibility of exposing a lot of the latest tech to a new demographic of people that probably were 'too old' to 'get it', or not tech savvy enough to use it. The combination of a voice interface (not perfect, but improving) with access to all the latest web services spanning music, telephony, email, todo lists, home automation, etc is huge. I can now actually envision my parents, or even grandparents using services like Spotify, Podcasts, Connected Calendars, VOIP, and any number of things that the tech savvy take for granted through their phones or other devices.

Circling back to my first statement about Apple; the quintessential consumer oriented tech company. The company that's supposed to make all things nasty and complicated into things that are simple and accessible. How did Apple who already had Apple TV (home box), Siri (voice interface), Itunes (music and app ecosystem), Icloud( ugh.. but still integrated personal mgmt) and FaceTime (VOIP) not come up with this sooner. Or at least, once they saw Alexa gaining popularity not just bundle up their services and release it. Apple typically is late to the party with a more refined product, but Amazon is executing at an impressive rate these days and it's getting harder to see how Apple can close the gap.

[dkrich]

Apple spends years meticulously developing and then releasing the most successful (and profitable) consumer computing platform of all time. Nearly every man, woman and child in the US has an Apple device no more than five feet from them at all time that's completely capable of controlling every home device connected to the internet.

Amazon spends years and billions of dollars trying to compete in the hardware space with Apple, unsuccessfully releasing a phone and several very average tablet devices, none of which really gain much traction.

Then they release a device that can respond only to voice "pretty well" which can now handle VOIP calls only with other Amazon devices and we are ceding this battle to Amazon?

I think Amazon has to greatly improve the user experience before the Echo moves past a cool novelty item for me. I own one, and I can honestly say I feel no desire to purchase any more.

My Nest cam on the other hand I use all day to monitor my dog (using my iPhone) and often consider switching to Google Home and buying more Nest products because I feel invested in that ecosystem.

To me, the tablet/smart phone experience is just more efficient and easier than dealing with voice. That's just my own experience though, and time may prove me very wrong.

[dtien]

You're almost speaking to my point, Apple did create one of the best and widely adopted computing platforms out there with the Smart Phone. And yet... even you describe it as a 'computing device'.

Echo/Alexa is the first step to that ubiquitous IoT future, where computing is sort of removed from the terminology and services are just available on demand in the most natural of human interfaces -- voice.

Similar to that first moment of watching a 5 year old ( or 60 year old ) accessing YouTube on an Ipad ( simplified touch interface ) when the first i-devices came out. The voice interface will be just as transformative, if not more so.

The moment for me was when my 2 year old niece screamed, "Alexa, play the gummy bear song"... and it started playing, and she started dancing. That was a game changing moment for me, to realize that this device opens the doors for the young, the old, the impaired, and even the tech averse to access all kinds of cool tech that we take for granted. Hell even for me, "Alexa, play the latest 'how I built this' podcast"

Don't get me wrong, typing and touch is infinitely more efficient and powerful, but voice will be infinitely more accessible. Touch devices, as simple as they are, still require a mental model of which icons provide which services, clicking through and typing out requests and looking at results, versus what my 2 year old niece was able to do with Alexa.

[dkrich]

My point is that the iPhone/iPad/Android-enabled tablet is a ubiquitous IoT control panel.

I disagree that the most natural of human interfaces is voice. It's like saying that listening to an audiobook will always be a better way to consume media than watching a video. Audio only is great for some use cases, but not most. Humans developed the ability to see, touch, hear, and speak for a reason. After all, radios predated television by a long shot. Then when televisions were released, they pretty much cannibalized the sale of the home radio, because it added the ability to see in real time what you were listening to.

Speech is most certainly an important part of communication for humans, but it's just one, and only best for certain things. Simple queries like "what's the weather today?" or "play some music" is better said than typed, I would agree. But for lots of other tasks its just not efficient. I'd rather pull out my phone and search for restaurant recommendations than try and fumble around communicating by voice. When I pull up the Yelp app, I can instantly view a list of many of restaurants and because I'm used to the interface and visual cues, like the number of stars, location, and reviews, I can discern what I think I'd like very quickly. Now imagine a human trying to describe what they saw on that app to me. It'd be impossible to do. It's just very difficult to convey subtleties with voice only.

As an aside, if Apple wanted to get into the IoT business and pose a threat to Amazon, I think if they released some sort of "Always On" listening mode and began giving developers the ability to build apps which responded to it, they'd already be caught up. If I could say "play some music" or "Face Time Dave" and it solved the simple query problem, I don't know that I'd ever use my Echo again (I maybe use it once or twice a week now).

[dtien]

In terms of voice/speech, we maybe talking on different points. I'm considering voice as an input mechanism, but the output mechanism certainly has to be dynamic and use the most sensible mechanism in the given context. Ex:

1. Alexa play song --> output on in-built speaker

2. "Alexa turn on Warriors game", "Alexa play latest episode of Game of Thrones" --> output onto nearest TV

3. Alexa get direction to San Francisco --> sends to my phone screen

4. Alexa show me top Sushi restaurants nearby --> send to nearest display ( TV or phone )

... and so on.

So yes, I definitely agree with you, voice as an output quickly becomes untenable. But again, that's what I mean by ubiquitous, you're no longer tied to a device for input/output. Your environment/context will define what your input/output mechanisms are. Outputs can be any displays, speakers, TVs, thermostats, lights, etc. And in most cases, voice is the simplest, most intuitive input mechanism for simple queries that a majority of our daily interactions with our surroundings will require.

Just as touch devices required UI developers to simplify their interface design to accommodate 'touch access' by removing layers of menus, pages, etc. Voice will also precipitate this type of simplification of the interface to where the core elements are accessible with simple queries, with strong, complex NLP and search behind it.

And again, it's more about accessibility than it is about expressiveness through voice input.

[ghurtado]

> Nearly every man, woman and child in the US has an Apple device no more than five feet from them at all time

How did you come up with this claim? It's certainly not true for myself, my household, most of my relatives and most of my friends and coworkers.

[dkrich]

Well, Apple sells about 200 million iPhones a year, so when you add in iPad sales to that, unless you are outside the US, you should consider yourself in a very select minority.

[ghurtado]

200 million worldwide.

The iPhone currently has around 15% of the smartphone market:

https://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/27/iphone-15-percent-marke...

Last time I checked, 85% was most definitely not a minority.

[albedoa]

Hold up. Is it your belief that Apple's smartphone market share in 1Q16 is equal to the number of people who have iPhones or Apple products?

[ghurtado]

If you have a different figure, you should share it

[dkrich]

You're right, I stand corrected. Nobody uses Apple products. Let's move on.

[ghurtado]

Are those the only two possible scenarios? Either everyone has an Apple device within 5ft of them at all times or nobody uses Apple products?

[ehsankia]

I'm not sure how Google dropedp the ball? I see your argument that Apple was also well situated to create this, but other than starting a bit late, what has Google done wrong?

They are catching up very quickly, since like Apple, they are in a much better position to create this technology as they have most of the ingredients already. Google Home has managed to mostly catch up in 6 months to a product that's been out for over 2 years. 3rd party support is growing very fast, the new SDK opens many doors, the IFTTT/Actions support allows tinkerers to hack up cool new features, and when it comes to conversational AI, most agree that Google is far ahead.

That being said, the competition is still fierce and I'm loving the innovations each side brings.

[smokinn]

The Nexus Q was Google dropping the ball: https://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/the-google-nexus-...

I have a couple of friends who still have one in a drawer somewhere and it was just poor execution all around. They could have been way ahead of the curve but now they're playing catchup. They're definitely still very well positioned and catching up fast though. Google's AI capability and straightfoward integration with exclusive market-leading products (Google Now, Google Maps, etc.) will likely make them a leader eventually unless they drop the ball again.

[dtien]

I suppose for both Google and Apple 'dropping the ball' not only relates to starting late, but also

a) having the ingredients way before Amazon

b) knowing the market for such a product was viable(people were ready) and desirable($$ could be huge)

c) and having made failed attempts at it

Apple and Google both tried to attack it through the SmartTV effort, which came and went and didn't amount to much. People didn't want to spend upwards of $1K for such a thing, whoops. Then Google purchased Nest, thinking that would be a nice backdoor into the Home automated system -- I have a Nest also, good product, but again, not the right entry way for this product category.

Than along comes Amazon and creates essentially a wireless smart speaker, that you can talk to, at a $100 price tag. Boom.

Don't get me wrong, Google Home is catching up fast and I had a heavy debate/research session when we got Alexa on whether I should exchange it for Home. But in the end, it just didn't matter, Alexa did things well enough at this point. Google may have the better, more widely adopted ecosystem (Gmail, Calendar, etc), the Voice assistant is likely better from what I've read, and I have no doubt Google can do the SDK/app ecosystem in a great way. But really, I feel like Alexa is doing things just well enough to keep the competition at bay, and with their head start, they're owning the consumer mindshare. And the combination of those 2 things might be enough to fend off any newcomers now.... though let the competition and innovation continue -- on that I agree!

[petra]

I don't have alexa, just "OK, Google", and the interaction model is very similar to the commandline - which isn't too positive when it comes to regular people.

And it fits with :

>> we primarily use it as a smart connected radio,

Does anybody see a solution to that problem ?

[ianai]

This might be the thing that stirs apple to action.

I'm under the impression that Alexa works much better at understanding than Siri? Is that true?

What would be great is if all these things could work together. Amazons smartphones are not compelling and they don't have laptops/desktops. It sounds like they do IoT well, while Apple does the later.

[mulletbum]

My gosh, yes. Alexa's ability to understand me far outclasses Siri in almost every manner.

[seanp2k2]

2011 re MobileMe http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-2...

The tech matters in that it must work, but what they've really been lacking is a cohesive story around how all of this stuff works together and what it enables people to do. Right now, my biggest interaction with iCloud is constantly being reminded that I'm out of storage on it, randomly, sometimes via CarPlay while driving.

Apple is a hardware company. Their software forays have been mixed. They do some awesome stuff and some terrible stuff. Many great iOS features were lifted from some combination of the jailbreak community + android. The App Store on Mac has some dumb limitations which have driven away some big and many small publishers. It's still hard to explain what iCloud does exactly and why storage on it costs $10/month for 1TB in 2017. The Photos app, which forcibly replaced the sometimes-liked iPhoto, regularly crashes / hangs for me when trying to import more than a couple hundred photos. It's awful and slow on a brand new top of the line maxed out rMBP when opening my library with ~20k photos. I don't really believe that I'm an outlier in how many photos I take, but the experience is awful, I can't enable any type of debug status / anything to tell me what it's actually doing, can't go back to iPhoto, Aperture is discontinued, and the storage format for the Photos library is not just flat files of the original sources, so it's basically impossible to switch to any other management software for this task (plus the iPhone won't sync with many other pieces of software). iTunes is and has been garbage for a decade and a half at this point, and again it's forced upon you if you use an iPhone. Have a problem with your phone? Forget fixing the configuration despite it all being there (I used to be into jailbreak and you can basically fix anything if you want to badly enough), it's time for a hard reset. Enjoy spending the whole day resetting your 2FA tokens. Look also at what they've done with Final Cut Pro. Combine this with how it's impossible to upgrade the GPU in the current Mac Pro to anything resembling current best-in-class pro performance levels, and it's easy to make the argument that Apple doesn't care about pro users as of about 5 years ago. Ooh yeah, and about Apple Maps, HomeKit, discontinuing wifi routers, the Apple TV, watchOS...

Above all, to me, this represents an internal issue with their leadership. Very few people there seem to know how to manage a software product. Granted it's a difficult thing to do well, but honestly, to me, their losses far outweigh their wins in this space in the past decade. They've had some big missed opportunities and while I don't have insight into their leadership, I don't see that changing any time soon.

Despite all of this, they continue to print money and move tons of product, so I guess from a purely capitalistic standpoint, who cares...but I know that they could do so much better with this stuff, and that hurts.

[ianai]

"I know that they could do so much better with this stuff, and that hurts". Pretty much what's wrong with all monopolistic power holders. Technology disrupts so many things but not factors leading to monopolistic industries.

[gordon_freeman]

Apple still has a huge advantage with their iOS app ecosystem. They can introduce a hardware and add an SDK to iOS that allows their developers to create apps that seamlessly work on that hardware. But they need to come up with the hardware fast because Amazon will race far ahead otherwise.

[ianai]

Let's not forget their huge cash on hand. Apple could purchase its way into any market and technology at this point.

[sosborn]

I really like apple stuff, but your sentence could have easily applied to Microsoft at the dawn of smartphones. Capital is not a guaranteed path to success.

[ianai]

Microsoft hasn't gone away. Both companies are huge successes. They've just got failures like everybody else. Unlike most, they're still owners of markets.