Smart assistants steal the limelight at CES 2018
Competition is heating up in the voice-commanded assistant space, with many big players keen to demonstrate their products at the biggest consumer electronics show in the world this week in Las Vegas
Virtual aides battled to rule “smart homes” on the eve of the official opening of the Consumer Electronics show gadget gala here.
Samsung, LG Electronics, Panasonic and others touted a future in which homes, cars and pockets brim with technology that collaborates to make lives easier.
Google and Amazon are key players in the trend, with their rival Assistant and Alexa voice-commanded virtual aides being woven deeper into consumer electronics and vehicles. Samsung meanwhile is playing catch-up with its Bixby assistant.
“The biggest theme is the fight for the connected home between Google and Amazon,” said Patrick Moorhead, of Moor Insights & Strategy, during a CES press briefing. “The notion that there is this new layer that can replace apps and operating systems means the stakes are high.”
If voice-commanded assistants become the new norm for interacting with computers and the internet, being the virtual aide of choice could be a powerful and profitable position.
“Competition is heating up for the smart assistant ecosystem, and the question is who is going to be the smart assistant of choice in 2018,” said Gartner analyst Brian Blau at CES.
Apple and Google have big leads, since their rival digital assistants are already on millions of smartphones and computers, according to Blau.
“That is why Amazon is being so aggressive; they need millions of more endpoints for Alexa in people’s hands,” Blau said. “The loser, if any, is Cortana, because nobody is talking about them,” he added, referring to Microsoft’s digital assistant.
But, Moorhead countered, Microsoft is likely playing to its strength by angling to be the dominant digital assistant in workplaces and Cortana is already on some half a billion computers powered by Windows 10 software.