Amazon, Google, and Apple could jump start that by agreeing now on a universal format for all the personal information needed to train an assistant. Every new technology gets commoditized eventually, and Alexa and her friends will ultimately speak the same language, whether it’s because governments legislate it, monopolies force it, or customers demand it. Eventually (and in the European Union, much sooner than that), the data that runs the voice assistant business is going to have to be standardized. Right now, all these assistants behave like selfish employees who think they can protect their jobs by holding vital expertise or passwords close to their chests. But it will do nothing to help you transport the knowledge you’ve shared with Alexa over to your new platform. If you use Alexa and then realize you’d rather switch to Google Assistant, Sonos will comply. But Sonos’s Switzerland gambit doesn’t really help us with personal data lock-in. You can use Alexa with it today by next year, Google and Siri will work on it, too. Sonos, the leader in great-sounding wireless home music systems, just released a voice-activated speaker that promises to be platform-agnostic. Before you’re done weighing all these factors, you may need to hire a consultant to help you make a choice. As a company that makes its profits mostly by selling hardware, Apple has often been more protective of its users’ privacy than the competition. Siri, Apple’s pioneering but now lagging entrant in this market, will soon enter the home with Apple’s new HomePod device. Google is primarily an advertising company, so somewhere down the line you can bet it will find ways for its Assistant to present you with “sponsored” suggestions. Amazon is primarily a store, so its likely long-term plan is to use Alexa to sell you more stuff. You can switch hardware, but you can’t just say, “Hey, Google! Tell Alexa everything you know about me.”Įach option comes with costs, too.
Putting all that energy into the Google Assistant-whether actively, by setting presets and training the program, or passively, by letting it observe my behavior-meant I wasn’t putting it into Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri. But that investment of time and personal data isn’t so easy to replace. If I want to switch assistants down the line, sure, I can just go out and buy another device. Once I started granting Google’s artificial intelligence-driven network access to the minutiae of my life-what time I wake up, how I commute to work, what music I like to relax to, who I call, what food I order, and all of the other details that a voice assistant hoovers up in order to make itself useful to you-I would be placing a long-term bet. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.īut I wasn’t just powering up a device.
Scott Rosenberg is an editor at Backchannel.
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