Google eyes to catch Amazon in digital assistant race

Bloomberg

Here is Google’s vision for the future of computing: As you drive home from work, you tell your car, “Ok, Google,” triggering the company’s Assistant. You order food, the digital helper handles the transaction and makes sure it’s ready when you arrive.
Right now, Amazon.com Inc. and its Alexa digital assistant are closer to realizing that goal, having cut a deal this year with Ford Motor Co. to let drivers search, shop and control other devices by voice from their vehicles.
That’s just one of the ways Amazon is outpacing Google in the race to weave a digital assistant into consumers’ lives. What’s more, Amazon has a leading e-commerce business well suited to this emerging world, with a massive delivery network to speed orders to shoppers — an area where Google has struggled.
Amazon’s Echo connected speakers, launched in 2014, have given Alexa an early lead by reaching millions of users at home, while Google’s rival Home device only came out late last year. “Amazon kind of fell into this lead in 2014 because it wanted to sell more things to people in new ways,” said Brian Roemmele, founder of ReadMultiplex.com, a website about voice-based commerce and computing. “Google is trying to evolve its online search experience into devices that have a voice. That philosophy limits its ability to really go after Amazon.”
Central to Alexa’s appeal: Amazon has thousands of voice-based apps up and running, far out-numbering Google’s tally. The Alphabet Inc. unit used its I/O developer conference this week to try to narrow Amazon’s lead by wooing skilled programmers capable of building tools and services that can make the Google Assistant more useful.
The company stressed experience with mobile software and the millions of things it already understands on the web and in the real world. Vehicle and payment functions were rolled out to expand the Assistant beyond the more simple ways people use it now, such as setting alarms and playing music. “A lot of what you need to get done is transactional,” said Gummi Hafsteinsson, product director for the Assistant. “We take care of all the nitty-gritty hard parts.”
Technology giants think voice-based computing could be the next big platform, after mobile. The company that wins will have the most users talking to devices and the most developers creating new experiences. Google’s Assistant has only been active for six months. That’s a major disadvantage when it comes to
creating that virtuous circle of users and developers.
It tried to get that circle spinning faster at I/O. About 7,000 conference attendees were offered a free Google Home speaker and $700 worth of credits for its cloud-computing service. The company is hoping these developers will use both to build and test new voice-based apps (known as Actions on Google) for the company’s Assistant. It needs to fire up these developers, many of whom have already been building for Amazon’s Alexa system. By February, there were 10,000 Alexa Skills — the equivalent of an app for Amazon’s voice-based system — up from 1,000 in June 2016. Bloomberg News counted fewer than 300 Actions for Google’s Assistant built by outside developers. Last June, the voice-based technology wasn’t available publicly yet.
Neither company is anywhere close to the dream of a naturally conversant machine. But Google is leaning on its expertise in artificial intelligence fields like voice recognition and automated language understanding to push it ahead if or when this form of human-computer interaction takes off. It also hopes long experience collecting and organizing information from the web will provide a useful fallback solution when the company’s Assistant lacks a specific Action to address user questions.
Take cooking recipes, an early use for hands-free speakers. By November, Alexa could talk budding home chefs through more than 60,000 recipes. That came from a Skills integration with the cooking app Allrecipes. The latest Echo Look
device, with a screen, is particularly
well suited to voice-based kitchen use
because it can show people recipes, as well as tell them about ingredients and cooking steps.
Bloomberg News asked Google’s Assistant to talk to Allrecipes, and the digital helper sent web links rather than an integrated voice-based Action. However, the Assistant has access to 45,000 recipe websites that have already been marked up with special code that lets Google’s software read out ingredients and other related information, Hafsteinsson said.
“Google has better understanding. It has been working on AI much longer,”said Patricia Carando, a mobile developer attending the I/O conference. She’s been working on an Alexa Skill, but she was learning how to create an Action for Google’s Assistant during coding classes at the event. Eventually, consumers will pick one digital assistant “and stick with it,” pushing developers to mostly build on that platform, she added.
A deep concern for Google is that more people will stick with Amazon or a potential device from other competitors like Apple Inc. That’s behind Google’s rush to integrate its Assistant with any and all connected devices. At I/O, Google executives unveiled Home Graph, a system for connecting and controlling smart home devices by speaking to the Assistant.