With the Super Bowl LII coming ahead, amazing advertisements are expected, as always, and this year Amazon did not hesitate to step its game up. During a 90 second ad, they organization shows its team in crisis because her intelligent personal assistance lost her voice.
So as one of the members of the team says she’s got everything under control, celebrities receive an Amazon package containing a set of headphones. The stars, including Rebel Wilson, Anthony Hopkins, Cardi B, Gordon Ramsay, seem pretty excited to receive the headphones, and a funny situation develops between them and their clients.
By the end of the of the announcement, Alexa recovers his capability of speaking, now with a new more human-like voice and retakes the lead.
Misunderstandings and reasons behind the ad
TechCrunch explains that there used to be a rumor of Amazon signing patents for “Alexa-enable headphones” and also another one that claimed the company stated the release of mobile accessories that aimed to take the personal assistant everywhere. But Amazon shot the rumor down, explaining that the headphones shown in the ad were just a prop.
Since the big companies that make up the trident of technology, Google, Amazon, and Apple are all competing to become the preferred smart home assistant, it is not a surprise that Amazon decided to go for to 5 million dollars per 30 seconds costing ad.
Amazon even released an Echo Spot by the end of last year, which is a smaller assistant than Alexa but works with the same technology. The little helper aims to get Alexa everywhere, making her become a part of everybody’s life in every aspect. They even added a small camera to the spot that allows making free video calls to the US, Canada, and Mexico.
The company expects people to get multiple Echo Spots for their home, claiming you can have one on your desk, one on your room, kitchen, even bathroom. So TechCrunch also believes the whole ad was also for launching the little assistant to a bigger audience.
According to USA Today, Alexa remains the leading digital assistant. They explain:
“Despite the increased competition, Alexa remains the most popular. According to research firm eMarketer, 68% of voice-enabled speaker users in the U.S. this year will use an Amazon Echo, while 25% will use Google Home. Next month, Apple leaps into the smart speaker business with the sale of its HomePod.”
She came to stay
Since Amazon first personal assistant announcement in November 2014, Alexa’s release, the digital helper was only thought to become bigger and greater to develop the system with a notorious speed.
Four years passed and the computer-voice inspired conversational system has developed not only into a home assistant but also a business one.
Skills are added continuously to Alexa to increase the abilities of the user. These skills are contained in the Alexa App, and they are developed by third-parties voice experiences that enhance the Alexa-enabled device experience.
Alexa is currently a bilingual system, an English-German one, but it is available around 35 countries of the globe. And her voice service (AVS), provides speech-recognition and natural language understanding, thanks to the Amazon Lex service.
A new competitor hopes to take on Alexa sooner or later
Mycroft’s voice assistant, Mycroft Mark II, was created to be an alternative source to the existent “big-tech voice assistance,” according to FastCompany. The CEO of the company, Joshua Montgomery, does not trust any of the companies part the tech trident since the privacy issues always seem to have a problem going on.
Since these assistants work with pools of data to enrich the experience overall, neither Amazon or Google offer an automatic delete of the data- Apple does (they delete everything after six months of preserving it).
Montgomery expressed his concern about this issues, since he says that protecting the user is not among the interests of the companies, but to enrich their own products at risking the users.
The CEO explains:
“As these technologies become a significant part of how we interact with technology, the question really becomes, ‘When I ask this device a question, am I getting the best answer for me, or am I getting the best answer for whatever company developed the tech?’”
Mycroft’s digital assistant is thought to be much more than its privacy-based terms since it is planned to be customizable in a greater way than the Echo or Google Home, for instance, letting the user prioritize its own online services, unlike Google and Amazon that set the system to prioritize theirs automatically.
Marshall Erwin, the director of Mozilla trust and security department, explains that this whole situation based on privacy indifference is what lead these big companies to get where they are, but he still highlights that transparency is the key when collecting and retaining private data.
Erwin expects people begin to understand the managing of the data being used, or at least be familiarized with the way these companies gather the information they need for keeping their audiences satisfied.
Source: USA Today