50 State of Voice will conclude tomorrow with the release of Part 5 of the five-part series.
We pushed its release back one day to comment on the story and article below, which Bret Kinsella and Voicebot released hours ago.
I can't make you love me, if you don't.
You can't make your heart feel something it won't.
Here in the dark, in these final hours,
I will lay down my heart, and I'll feel the power.
But you won't, no you won't…
Cause I can't make you love me, if you don't…
Hours ago, Bret Kinsella of Voicebot (in conjunction with the folks at Voxalyze) released Amazon Alexa Skill Growth Has Slowed Further in 2020, an article detailing the decline in worldwide third-party adoption of the Amazon Alexa ecosystem.
This is an absolute must-read piece no matter what it is in voice tech or AI you’re doing.
I’ll pause a moment for you to go read it. Then come on back, cause we’ve got some things to discuss.
First, it’s another of Bret’s pieces of research which I include in every talk I ever give about voice, which this year have been many.
It’s this chart right here:
This chart shows Amazon vs Google market share in 2019 at 61% and 24% respectively, before 2020 then witnesses an Amazon decline roughly equivalent to Google’s gain.
This is a telltale sign of the onset of a duopoly, defined by what one of the two major players takes, they take from the other major player, while the smaller players stay relatively fixed as a percentage of the total.
This is a Coke vs Pepsi, a Nintendo vs Sega (looking at you, my 80’s and 90’s gamers), FedEx vs UPS or iOS vs Android scenario that we’re seeing the birth of here.
These become very competitive, very quickly, with companies participating in duopolies leaning heavily on their unique strengths as they ramp up marketing dollars to communicate those strengths to the marketplace in a way that will move share into their column and away from their competitor.
The one exception to this that we’ve seen from time to time is when one of these companies in a duopoly fail to recognize that, in fact, they are in a duopoly. Amazon appears it may be in a state of denial that Google has indeed caught up to them, and by several measurements we could discuss, has the #1 mainstream voice AI on the planet.
Amazon’s investment in cultivating the third-party ecosystem of Alexa skills has been a defining feature of the voice/AI landscape for the past few years.
Major companies have produced incredible experiences that have unquestionably moved Alexa much further, as an ecosystem, from where it otherwise would’ve been.
More importantly, many of these experiences provided a hopeful glimpse into the future, creating even more momentum.
Even if this investment in the third-party ecosystem moved unit sales of Echo devices even 1%, that’s still a massive return based on the sales figures we’ve seen year after year.
And yet, here we are, somehow wondering how Amazon really feels about third-party developers, in the face of conflicting information.
Consider:
1) Amazon spends a tremendous amount of money advertising Alexa and Echo devices on TV. Every time I turn on an NFL game, I see an ad. Many other places too.
They’ve advertised music. They’ve advertised video communication. They’ve advertised Samuel L. Jackson.
But have they advertised Sleep Sounds? Have they advertised Question of the Day? Have they advertised Skyrim Very Special Edition? Or anything else in here?
They easily could spend some money and advertise a third-party developer, simply as an experiment, with a big-time, nationwide ad campaign.
They could say: let’s see how people respond when we celebrate someone who chose us, while everything was still brand new.
Nope. Haven’t even done that.
2) Years ago, at the onset of Amazon’s embrace of third-party developers, a “black box” model in which Amazon distributes cash to developers for creating popular third-party Alexa skills made some sense.
They didn’t want anyone to get attached to something that may not be around for long.
To continue this practice today, however, smacks of something a bit more out of touch.
Failing to provide transparency in how Amazon pays third-party Alexa developers sends a very clear, unambiguous signal today: stick around if you like, but we really don’t care.
Everything about this black box policy is the antithesis of how Apple built the App Store and how other major marketplaces gained traction: through transparency.
3) Thanks to mainstream media gone amok, Jeff Bezos is portrayed two-dimensionally as simply a number: his net worth.
The media discusses, weekly it seems, how much it’s gone up or down and what societal problem Bezos could end today if he chose.
With this, along with his recent divorce ending a marriage of 25 years in length, no one would blame him for retreating away from everybody and everything, and it’s unclear what that environment (on top of the existing complications of the pandemic) is doing to Amazon’s culture.
Dave Isbitski’s defection from the Alexa team stings - he was a critical architect of much of the early success of that business unit.
How much of Alexa’s backslide relates to internal cultural issues?
The answer is clearly something greater than zero.
4) The press event Amazon recently did, announcing a variety of new Echo devices, was closed to the public.
Meanwhile, Google’s event, just a week or so later, was open to everyone.
Good anecdote to understand the current mindset of both of these companies.
We’ve seen companies, both small and large, experiment with Alexa skills before diving into the Alexa ecosystem further, or striking out on their own to create richer conversational AI capabilities.
Either way, Amazon’s ecosystem provides the gateway drug into voice and AI, giving Amazon first crack at building loyalty with companies all over the world.
Google has nothing of the sort. Google is still a second stop on the voice/AI journey for most major brands, as evidenced by our own research for This Week In Voice VIP detailing the activities and voice/AI investment of the Fortune 500.
All of this is an immensely valuable thing to so cavalierly throw away, whether intentionally and explicitly, or whether indirectly through an extended period of neglect.
But as Bonnie Raitt says - and when she speaks, you should listen:
I can’t make you love me, if you don’t.
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