But if you give something a voice, it takes on life.
Give it a name and it becomes real.
That is the lesson I learned at CES 2017 in Las Vegas this week. Amazon has a voice with a name—Alexa—and it was everywhere.
Because of Alexa, the Internet of Things has become real.
Over the years, CES has often been dominated by companies that are not, officially, there. When the iPhone was exploding between 2009 and 2014, almost everything Apple did effected the ecosystem. And yet, Apple never has an official presence at CES. Same thing with Google when Android became the de facto operating system for every random smartphone, tablet and gadget to hit the market.
This year, it is Amazon.
To be fair, even when companies are not present at CES in an official capacity, they are often still there with their own meeting rooms in secluded parts of the convention center and suites at high-end hotels. They have invite-only parties that people gush about the next day. CES is the convention where the tone is set for the year and conversations for future deals and partnerships take place. Even the biggest of the big tech companies are not immune from that.
Amazon did not have a massive booth on the show floor at Las Vegas Convention Center. To my knowledge, it never has. Amazon did have a couple smaller booths scattered around various halls, but those were for very specific products (like a tiny booth for Amazon Marketing Services). And yet, Amazon—more specifically Alexa—was on everybody’s lips.
The Internet of Things has been gaining mindshare among the public for years. In reality though, people have never really known what it is and how it works. Connect a gadget with a sensor and an Internet connection, they hear, and you have the Internet of Things.
In many ways, the Internet of Things moniker has done the burgeoning ecosystem of connected gadgets a disservice. People expect that one day there will just be this Internet of stuff. But, like the real Internet, the Internet of Things will evolve gradually, in fits and starts. Until one day we look around and realize that everything we touch is connected.
To call connected gadgets the Internet of Things makes the ecosystem so large and opaque that it defies explanation. What the Internet of Things really has become is a series of initiatives to connect various aspects of our lives and business. Think of the Internet of Things as kingdom with many fiefdoms. The smart home is a fiefdom. So is the car. So are healthcare, fitness, education, cities/infrastructure, manufacturing, aviation, retail, banking and so forth. All of these fiefdoms are in various states of evolution. The smart home is almost mature. Education is way behind.
The opacity of the definition of the Internet of Things has led consumers more towards confusion than clarity. They know they can get a connected light bulb, but they don’t know how, when, where or why. They wonder why their fridge needs to be connected … or their toaster (the connected toaster has long been a joke to explain IoT). In many ways, the Internet of Things has not be real for people, no matter the hype around it.
And then comes Alexa.
Alexa is a voice. That connected fridge all of a sudden makes sense when you can talk to it … and it talks back. Because Alexa is a voice and has a name, connected gadgets all of a sudden become real and tangible to people. Consumers will begin seeking out products that have Alexa because, for the first time, they understand what a connected gadget can do in their lives, their homes, their cars.
When we look back on the rise of the apps economy, two foundational elements were instrumental in creating a whole new world of functionality: app stores and the cloud. The app stores gave people tangible destinations to get new software and the cloud provided the smarts, compute capability and storage.
In the connected gadgets economy, two foundational elements will be instrumental will define a new world of functionality: voice platforms like Alexa and machine learning (running in the background in the cloud). Alexa provides clear and intuitive functionality (through “skills,” the voice equivalent of apps) and machine learning provides the intelligence to personalize and improve each gadget to each individual.
In several years we will look back and realize that the release of Alexa Voice Services by Amazon in 2015 was the inflection point for the consumer Internet of Things, the triggering event that all of a sudden made it real.
Weekly Archive Links Of The Week
ARC RESEARCH … released our annual report on the top health, fitness and medical apps in the apps economy. What’s the best fitness app in the App Store? ARC has an answer for you.
APPLAUSE … predicts that the “liquid” workforce will dominate the tech industry in 2017. Check out what else Applause predicts for 2017.
THE APP STORE … generated $3 billion in revenue in December, a record month for Apple.
VOICE … is not a fad. Nearly three-quarters (72%) of people want to talk to their gadgets.
SAMSUNG … told me when it first released its Gear smartwatches that it would eventually work with non-Samsung smartphones. Well, finally, Gear smartwatches will work with the iPhone.
HERE … is a roundup of the best gadgets from CES 2017.
FITBIT … by far the leader in wearables these days, wants to release a wearable app store.
THE … 10th anniversary of the announcement of the iPhone happened this week. The “real” birthday comes when the iPhone was actually released to the public in July 2007.
RUSSIANS … are, well, being Russian.
ONLINE … sales were $91.7 billion in the United States from Nov. 1 to Dec. 31, per Adobe.
NOT … to be outdone by Alexa, Google Assistant will come to TVs and Android Wear smartwatches. The Google Assistant will also be baked into small speaker/microphones that plug into wall sockets from Nvidia. This is the next arms race in the software economy.
ARC has a lot more from CES 2017, so stay tuned this week for more stories on the evolution of digital experience, fitness, gadgets and more.
ARC will be at the National Retail Federation’s “Big Show” in Manhattan next week. Come say hello and tell us what you’ve been working on.
Take deeper breaths, think bigger thoughts.
Dan Rowinski
Editor-in-Chief
ARC – The Application Resource Center
