Wednesday, January 10, 2018

“Alexa” Battles “Home” at CES. Radio Should be Watching.



The world’s largest search company is not going to let the world’s largest online retail website win the voice-enabled home-assistant war without a big fight. Google has taken over Las Vegas, promoting it’s product “Home” in an effort to gain ground on Amazon’s Echo. And radio should take notice that Google is a serious player in this fight, and make sure their radio stations are not only Alexa-enabled, but also Google Home-enabled.

Google has wallpapered the streets of Las Vegas with the words “Hey Google” during CES and Google has installed a twirling slide and a ball pit in the convention center parking lot to attract attendees. Wired reports you can barely turn around without seeing a “Hey Google” billboard reminding you of the power of the company’s voice-activated bot. “Google Assistant is everywhere in Vegas because Google wants desperately for Assistant to be everywhere in your gadgets.”

Amazon’s Echo is winning the virtual assistant battle so far. Last year at CES Alexa was already in hundreds of third-party devices and the company says it has sold “tens of millions” of it s devices. In late 2017, Juniper Research reported that smart devices like the Amazon Echo, Google Home and Sonos One will be installed in 55 percent of U.S. households by 2022. The report stated that over 70 million households will have at least one smart speaker and the total number of installed devices will be more than 175 million. eMarketer recently reported that 35.6 million U.S. consumers would use a voice-activated device at least once per month in 2017, representing 128.9 percent growth over last year.

Watch for the Radio Ink January 29 cover story with The Director of Amazon Music Ryan Reddington and former Q101 Chicago PD Alex Luke, Amazon’s Global Head of Programming and Content Strategy for Amazon Music. We discuss the possible synergies between Amazon Music, Alexa and your radio stations.

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