Smart Speakers

Smart speakers could be much more than just music,

weather, and the news

It’s been four years since Amazon.com’s Echo first hit

the market, and so far smart speakers haven’t amounted

to much more than glorified radios that can control the

Lights.

At the very least, these devices were supposed to have

changed the way we shop. But a damning report in The

Information recently revealed that of the 50 million owners

of an Alexa-enabled device, only 2% have used their voice

to make a purchase even once — and of those, only 10%

made a second purchase. Study after study shows that

people continue to use smart speakers primarily for the

basics: music, weather, and the news.

While smart speakers are popular and entertaining, at the

end of the day they just aren’t that useful. They’re still

awkward to interact with, they can’t handle complexity very

well, and features with a lot of potential, like push notifications,

are still in a nascent stage. As a result, each of the major

technology companies in the market — Amazon AMZN, -0.73%

Google GOOG, -0.78%GOOGL, -0.70% and Apple AAPL, -0.19%

in the US, and Baidu BIDU, -0.77%Alibaba BABA, -1.42% and

Tencent 0700, -1.97% TCEHY, +1.86% in China — have been

competing on either price or sound quality.

That leaves us with a fiercely competitive market full of

devices that all pretty much do the same thing: not very much.

However, there are a series of applications in the health and

security verticals which could transform these devices from a

“nice-to-have” to an absolute “must-have” product. Whichever

company is able to deliver credible innovations in these two

areas will break through the noise. Doing so will require

companies to go beyond merely adapting ideas that have

already proven to work on mobile phones, but instead

creating entirely new concepts that are native to smart

speakers and built with a voice-based interaction in mind.

Take health, for example. Contrast the difference between a

text-based calendar alert reminding you to take your

medications to an automated conversational check-in that

asks how your treatment is going and whether you’re

experiencing any issues or unexpected abnormalities. Without

any additional effort on your part, your responses could be

automatically uploaded to a health record and shared as

necessary with your doctors and family members to review.

That would amount to far more than an incremental improvement.