AMAZON’S CLEVER APPROACH TO THE
VOICE ASSISTANT MARKET
At this point, we return to the privacy issue. Yes,
bringing it up again now feels like a punchline,
considering Amazon’s clear drive to bring
Alexa basically everywhere you are. However,
as Enrique Dans, Professor of Innovation at IE
Business School, has explained in a Medium
article, “most people are now no longer
concerned about the company recording
conversations, because they understand that
this is how algorithms are trained.”
Therefore, we could probably easily see
Amazon’s shares of both the smart speaker
and voice assistant markets grow yet further –
especially given the highly competitive prices
of Echo products. Richard Yao, Senior Associate
of Strategy and Content at IPG Media Lab, has
argued in another Medium article that right
now, Amazon is clearly prioritizing market share
over profit – a wise strategy given that as digital
assistants gain further acceptance, Alexa will
thrive by simply being there.
This isn’t strictly to say that Amazon won’t
face further challenges on the way there. In an
interview with OneZero, Alexa’s chief scientist
Rohit Prasad admitted that the voice assistant
explaining some of its more inexplicable
behavior could prove much easier said than
done. This is despite Amazon having publicly
committed to Alexa justifying itself in this way.
When making decisions, Alexa relies on deep
neural networks that prevent Amazon from
easily seeing how those decisions were made.
Nonetheless, voice technology evidently
remains a sleeping giant just waiting to