Amazon's Alexa Is the Brains Behind Many New Smart Home Products
If your notion of getting things done around the house involves shouting commands to anyone within earshot, you’re in for a booming year. Voice control is coming to smart home devices and appliances in a big way, judging from the many such product introductions at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Manufacturers are programming their wares—from LED bulbs to door locks to bathroom scales to refrigerators—so they’re compatible with one or more voice-activated digital assistants. Their names are Google Assistant, which you can talk to through the Google Home speaker; Siri, which takes orders from iPhones, iPads, Apple TV, and Apple Watch; Cortana, which lives in Microsoft’s operating system; and, of course, Alexa, the voice of the Amazon Echo and that speaker’s expanding family of relatives.
Alexa clearly dominated CES, and it has quite a head start over the other two big contenders. Google Home launched just last fall, two years after the Echo, and Apple HomeKit adoption has been slow because of the extremely involved approval process.
“Amazon is taking a very aggressive early lead,” says Tuong Nguyen, principal research analyst with Gartner. “I feel there’s still a lot of opportunity for competition, and I’m not sure if it’s going to be an either-or situation.”
Whatever the platform, it’s easy to see why the talk-to-your-tech trend is taking off. Speaking to a smart home device is faster and easier than fishing out your smartphone, waking it up, swiping to the relevant app, and pressing a button.
“The best user interface is no interface,” says Jason Johnson, founder and CEO of August Home, which makes the eponymous Smart Lock and Doorbell Cam. “Using your voice is not entirely natural the first time, but after asking Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant to lock your doors a couple of times, it becomes natural. And it’s definitely better than getting out of your warm cozy bed to walk down the hall and across the living room to make sure the door is locked.” (August Home products can be controlled with either Alexa or Siri.)
Among appliance makers at CES, LG, Whirlpool, GE, and Samsung all showed off products that take orders from Alexa. Samsung introduced a robot vacuum that you can start by issuing a command to an Echo. The forthcoming LG Smart InstaView Door-in-Door refrigerator will have a disembodied Alexa built right in, so you can ask it to pull up recipes on the touchscreen or order food directly from—you guessed it—Amazon Fresh.
As for Whirlpool, all of its connected appliances in 2017 will also integrate Alexa voice control, including fridges, ranges, microwaves, washers, and dryers. (Nobody’s figured out yet what to ask a dishwasher to do.) GE announced a suite of appliances last fall that can be controlled by Alexa-equipped devices.
What’s interesting about both the Whirlpool and GE ovens is that, unlike with the app, you can ask Alexa to turn on the oven, since safety isn’t an issue—if you’re within voice range, you’re in the house, and thus can be confident that someone is watching the oven.
With Alexa, you’ll also be able to turn on Dish Network’s Hopper set top box, ask a Hydrao showerhead how much water you used, and check how much juice is left in the battery of a BMW i3 electric car.
Does all this Alexa activity mean Apple is too far behind? Probably not.
“Everyone’s always asking what Apple’s doing,” says Nguyen. “Who knows what they’re doing? They keep everything close to the vest until they’re good and ready to tell everyone.”
Using Siri, you can control Chamberlain’s MyQ Garage door opener, Honeywell’s Lyric thermostat, iDevices electrical outlets, and locks from August, Yale, and Kwikset.
Google Home only recently launched and at this point it can control a few light switches, such as Belkin’s dimmer, and the AirMega air purifier. Oh yeah, and a Hyundai.
“It’s still early days with voice control,” says Nguyen. “I have an Amazon Prime account, but I share it with my wife, and Alexa is always suggesting things to me for her. When it gets intelligent enough to understand that kind of complexity—that’s when it really gets cool."
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