That's exactly what they are. How well can you access your music library from the platform? Control your lights? Ask about the state of your car? Your thermostat? Your shopping account at Amazon? Access to the Google knowledge graph? Your Gmail inbox, with the inferred fight information and calendar data?
Now imagine coming into this arena with none of those integrations. Your system can answer some questions about the weather. It can tell you that your Imap mail account has 3 new messages. Everything else, you've got to do the engineering work yourself to integrate, while Google and Amazon just publish APIs.
They are just a lot less work (the platform provider does the bulk of it) so it's not that hard for third parties to support a couple of competing platforms. The barrier part is much less barrier-y than, say, desktop apps or smartphone apps. The space is also smaller and more constrained - nobody is going to invent an 'integration' as popular as, say, a snapchat.
For now most apps are pretty simple, but with better conversation skills (comprehension, keeping context, etc), developers might write some pretty advanced ones. And if one platform has infrastructure that can offload that and convert it into simple APIs, I can see it being a stronger lock-in than smartphone apps.
Agreed. Let's remember how simple apps used to be in the first home computers. $5 on a single floppy, mostly to convert duplication costs. As the market developed, they got more sophisticated and became a larger moat.
I think it'd be hard for anyone to remember that since it didn't really happen. Gates was complaining people were pirating his $75 BASIC pretty much right off the bat, for instance.
Now imagine coming into this arena with none of those integrations. Your system can answer some questions about the weather. It can tell you that your Imap mail account has 3 new messages. Everything else, you've got to do the engineering work yourself to integrate, while Google and Amazon just publish APIs.