This week has happened unusual in the war of voice attendees: Amazon and Google have presented their new domestic devices the same day. Echo Dot Max, Echo Studio, Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 11 on the one hand. Google Nest Cam, Nest Doorbell, Google Speaker and the renewed Google Home app on the other.
Why is it important. Calendar coincidence, yes, but above all shared emergency symptom. Because it is not just speakers with better serious or screens with more pixels. These are two technological giants, simultaneously burying their classic assistants – Alexa and Google Assistant – to replace them with conversational versions driven by large language models.
The context. The rules changed in November 2022. Since Chatgpt demonstrated what a real conversation means with iausers have learned that there is something better than asking a speaker to put music or activate a timer. These basic functions have become invisible. The microwave of technology: it is there, it works, nobody thinks of it.
What has happened. Alexa+ and Gemini for Home promise natural conversations, complex automation created in voice, cameras that understand context and not only detect movement. “Amazon has left a package at the entrance” instead of “activity has been detected.” Context, no events. Intention, not rigid commands.
But that future is priced: ten dollars a month in the basic plan, twenty in the complete. The hardware is only the entrance door to a recurring income model.
Between the lines. The inference costs of language models are huge and someone has to pay them. The AI becomes the new market segmentator: with it your product is Premium, without it it is a relic of the past.
These presentations arrive after years of stagnation. Alexa and Google Assistant had been doing the same thing: Music, alarms, time questions. The narrative has exhausted. Users have stopped imagining what else could these cylinders do and we have silently assumed that they are for what they are, in the same way we do not ask the oven that tells us jokes, because it is for something else.
The big question. Who will pay twenty dollars a month to use a speaker that mainly serves to ask time and reproduce Playlists? The problem is no longer technical. It is perception. Amazon and Google need us to see them otherwise, to set a new habit.
Meanwhile, Apple continues with the classic Siri. Limited, frustrating, stuck. Has integrated chatgpt as a crutch for certain consultations, but His real advance has stuck and delayed. And above all, it is created for iPhone, iPad and Mac … but not for Homepod. At least for now.
In summary. Expectations have already changed. Anyone who has used Chatgpt knows what a real conversation with AI means. Back to Siri after that feels like going back fifteen years.
Pre-cragpt voice attendees are dead. Amazon and Google have certified their death this week. They have gone to the burial and have begun to build another tool. The question is no longer whether Apple will present your answer. It is yes, when you finally do it, someone will continue to wait for it. Or if we will be to other things.
Outstanding image | Amazon, Google, Xataka
In Xataka | For years TV spoke to us. Now AI wants us to talk to him
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