Google Home Beats Amazon Echo in Q1 2018 Smart Speaker Shipments
voicebot.ai
voicebot.ai
1. Google and Amazon are pushing these with stupendous discounts, certainly below cost. That tells me that the revenue model is not the hardware. They hope to make money by manipulating me after I buy it. Nope.
2. Google injecting ads into the "My Day" information. Nope.
3. Google Home was found to be listening all the time due to a "hardware flaw." Nope.
4. Amazon devices doing the creepy laugh for no reason? Nope. I mean, come ON.
They couldn't pay me to incorporate one of these things into my living space. It's below-cost hardware running bigcorp-controlled, remotely updatable software intended to extract my info and dollars. Get lost!
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/3/16/14948696/g...
3: if your referring to the mini that a journalist got and found to be constantly recording small snippets of audio, I thought Google handled that really well. They had someone at his house to collect it the same day I think, and within days disabled the feature across the board even though only a small number of devices had the flaw.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/10/google-nerfing-home...
2. Right, Home was found to be recording thousands of times a day. Google quickly shipped a software update to disable it: that's the right damage control, and they deserve credit for that response.
But the point is that Google will happily "spy on everything I said" and not notice. Why should a random reporter have to dig through Google codenames to discover this spying? Shouldn't Google have safeguards in place? And see their pathetic response [1] that doesn't acknowledge the true problem at all.
Google could own these mistakes. But instead they deny their ads are ads, and characterize constant eavesdropping as "touch controls behaving incorrectly." They haven't learned a thing, and until they do, this stuff is going to happen again and again with their products.
1. In over two years the Home existing, that happened a SINGLE time, no money changed hands and once they realize it people didn't enjoy the experience, it never happened again.
Reading your original comment
> Google injecting ads into the "My Day" information
you make it sounds like this is something they do regularly all the time. It literally happened once a year ago and they apologized for it.
2. This was a hardware defect on a very very small number of units on a single type of smart speaker. The defect triggered the button at the top, which makes the speaker lights up, listen and tries to respond, so the user would clearly see it misbehaving. All recordings also show up on your activity page.
Again here, your original comment:
> Google Home was found to be listening all the time
You make it sound like his happened on all devices, was doing it intentionally and was doing it in an undisclosed secret way, when in fact it was a bug which realistically affected less than 0.00001% of the people and was fixed within a few hours once reported.
You can bend the truth and assume whatever crazy tinfoil theory you want, but that doesn't make it reality.
Remember when Google scooped up unsecured WiFi data via their creepy street view vehicles?
Yeah, that was a mistake by some mid-level manager and not intentional.
Don't even get me started on Facebook's "mistakes".
Regarding unexpectedly recording users: even if only one user was affected, the issue is that Google didn't show contrition. They characterized the problem as "touch controls behaving incorrectly" and did not acknowledge the privacy violation, except indirectly.
There's no conspiracy required here, the logic is very simple. Google is not losing money on these devices for fun.
As for ads, again, who cares what they said, actions is what matters. There hasn't been any other content like that since then.
2. Google still has the capacity to do it, and sure, this was a mistake, but just like Android records people's location by default, in the future google could decide for an opt-out feature that records for the sake of training ML, analytics, or some feature.
This is not about tinfoil conspiracies, this is simply caring about privacy. The vast majority of people in the US weren't directly affected by the NSA's espionage, but still there was public outcry because people like privacy.
If this guy/girl thinks it's better to be safe than sorry, let her/him do so. No need to get so defensive of Google.
EDIT: A downvote? I'm curious as to why (especially given there was no reply).
As it is, they don't have ads and they don't record without consent. You could argue all day about what they could or would do in the future, but I will reconsider my decision to use he device then. Let's get the facts about how the product works now straight for now.
What makes you apparently think
1) the current state of affairs is good enough coming from anyone in the BigCorp top10, particularily those already involved un data collection as core business?
2) future iterations on any of [hardware, software, business goals] will be conform to currently reasonable expectation of use from the general public ?
I mean we're talking about a corp that has internalised "Bait and Switch" as core business model..
This is newspeak. I am going to go up to someone in the street, put my hand in their pocket and when they don't enjoy the experience, I'll act all apologetic and surprised, kind of sad that they didn't enjoy the experience, but of course respecting their wishes and I would totally not try something similar in the future (except maybe their other pocket?) because I'm not at all a bad citizen just looking out for the shareholders ok?
Someone needs to make it happen.
This statement leaves me speechless. A huge feeling of vertigo. Are we really there?
This a war of attrition. FOMO is powerful and most people eventually give in. The companies co-opt your friends and family against you. They don't even realize what is happening.
For many people, the only computer they have is the smart phone, it's how they look for (and apply for jobs), do some banking, check emails and keep in touch with family, friends and colleagues.
It just doesn't seem to exist.
I considered getting a "dumb phone" and one of these devices because in some cases a tablet-style internet-only plan + pay-as-you-go minutes for the odd time I use a phone would be cheaper than a bundled smartphone plan.
At this point saving the $10/month isn't worth the hassle to me though and now I use Slack on my phone so damn much it'd never work :\
Sounds exactly like what I'm looking for.
If smartphones were completely useless, then we wouldn't actually need well-being features, we would just throw away our phones...
Only free thing at the moment is ARM, like Marvell CPUs.
Even Microsoft, which is Google's direct competitor for all of these services, hilariously depends on Play Services for nearly all of their Android apps. Office, Skype, etc. all will not run on an Android phone without Google.
I have a Windows Mobile phone these days, and for all the jokes about it being dead: I actually have a wider app selection than AOSP users. Android is a proprietary OS, and almost none of it's apps today are compatible with the open source version.
As it turned out, the Amazon Appstore version was so out of date it just didn't work anymore.
They profit at your ignorance.
The fact that it will execute commands with your recorded voice should tell you there's a lot of exploits that can happen without your intervention.
If I want a device to start listening I'll go and push a button for it. The always listening stuff is way too big an vulnerability (like an unsecured API into your house).
I get free unlimited google searching, gmail, google maps in return. I would pay a hefty amount if they starting charging for those and am happy to trade the use of my fairly benign data usage patterns in return.
> starts selling your information to the highest bidder.
I am confident they will never ever sell my personal information (not population-level aggregates, but actual raw data with PII) because they will lose their only source of revenue and will soon go bankrupt if they did so.
Most Google employees, if asked a few years ago, would've told you they were confident Google would never participate in something as unethical as the American drone program. They were wrong.
Corporations do not have a moral code, they operate on profits. They are effectively psychopaths, and any time you associate a corporation with human traits like ethics or morals, you have misjudged it.
And bear in mind: Corporations are not a singular person. You could believe the guy responsible for packing the Google Toolbar in every other installer you downloaded off the Internet will never betray you, but eventually Sundar Pichai will be replaced by someone else, and corporate focus can, and will, change.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that "profits" doesn't just mean how much money they can get today. It also means how much money they can get tomorrow, the next day, the next decade, the next century.
Things like consumer trust and confidence in the brand are extremely important to a company's long term profits. Yes, corporations are amoral, but you're not painting a very accurate picture when you compare them to psychopaths.
It's also not a generally accepted conclusion that the American drone program is unethical so I wouldn't use that as evidence of Google being unethical.
Our drone program is a massive-scale assassination program with little to no concern for innocent fatalities. It's death toll upon innocent civilians far exceeds the September 11th attacks on our country that precipitated it's creation. And it has killed hundreds of children.
Our country has gotten enough bloodthirsty revenge.
It's very easy to justify our drone program from a utilitarian perspective. All you have to do is show that it has a lower civilian to target ratio than more conventional forms of warfare. It's even easier if you count the lives of US soldiers as more important than civilians in war zones, and a lot of people agree with that.
I haven't read it yet, but I look forward to reading this 22 page paper [1] on the ethics of drone warfare. I read the abstract and the conclusion, which states that "much more nuanced and probing analysis of the moral dimension of remotely piloted aircraft operations is needed". Perhaps you will enjoy reading it as well.
edit: You've added some rather inflammatory language about killing children and civilians since I last saw your comment, so I thought I'd add this - it's pretty easy for anyone who's studied ethics to come up with situations in which killing hundreds of children can be justified with a common ethical framework. Ethics is not at all a black and white subject.
You're just trying to appeal to people's emotions instead of making an actual ethical argument.
Well...
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/15/90-of-peopl...
And...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone...
Then, in the body, it says the drone strikes "caused the deaths of unintended targets nearly nine out of ten times".
An unintended target is not the same as an innocent, and it's misleading to use them interchangeably.
Your second source is better, but you haven't provided any data on the civilian-to-target ratio of more conventional methods. You can't have a meaningful comparison without that.
IMHO Europe's GDPR should be mandating that companies are transparent about the value of the data collection and ads and allow users to pay the real cost instead to completely opt out.
TLS isn't going to help protect you when the site you're on is loaded with user tracking and analytics scripts anyway.
Google will claim that they make these moves because they care about your privacy, security, and freedom, but malicious tracking scripts they don't do anything about, because that would close off their own profit scheme.
And if Google's competitors are spying on HTTP rather than using tracking scripts, why does seemingly every page I visit load tracking scripts from a bunch of companies?
Of course, Google claims they do this for your benefit, but if it was for your benefit, they'd need to stop doing the same things with tracking scripts. This is how you can tell they are pushing these to reduce competition, not to increase your privacy.
"Chrome currently indicates HTTP connections with a neutral indicator. This doesn't reflect the true lack of security for HTTP connections. When you load a website over HTTP, someone else on the network can look at or modify the site before it gets to you."
The word 'modify' is a hyperlink to an article titled 'AT&T Hotspots: Now with Advertising Injection' [2] (ironically, a non-HTTPS site).
[1] https://security.googleblog.com/2016/09/moving-towards-more-... [2] http://webpolicy.org/2015/08/25/att-hotspots-now-with-advert...
0: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B01AFXZ2F4/R2TPT5454UEKL...
The text you quoted is disagreeing with the author with respect to the use of correlations to explain causality, which we both know will lead nowhere if all confounding variables are not properly accounted for; something which is infeasible to do in the real world.
"A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent.[1] One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man." - Wikipedia.
We don't know anything about how the parent poster uses his smartphone, if he has one.
Learn to recognise 'em people :)
If you trust Google to honor the privacy and data collection management options, then I see no reason not to apply that same level of trust to their home speaker product.
Now, whether these devices are capable of doing this on a targeted basis, that's possible. That same possibility exists with the closed source baseband chip in all our smartphones as well, though.
Yes the parent comment makes it sound like this is something that happened all the time... I'm not sure why a comment literally spreading lies is the top comment, I guess HN loves crazy tinfoil hat alternative truth now.
Similarly with #3, it was a hardware bug that impacted a very very small number of devices, and which was fixed within hours of being reported. It was also very obvious the device was misbehaving so implying that Google was "spying" is stupid. Why would Google make the device light up and make noises if they were spying on you?
Nobody is forcing you to use any of those smart speaker devices, and nobody is forcing you to buy them. Many people really enjoy using their Google Home or an Amazon Echo, as it greatly improves aspects of their day-to-day life. Some people with disabilities are actually greatly alleviate by this progress - they can now use their voice to control many different things within their house which was not possible before.
However, for me this screams of a Facebook style scandal coming sooner or later. People buying these things often don't really know what the business model is behind this, and don't know really know how Amazon/Google is going to make money. We can all sit here and speculate about it as informed people, but that's not the general market. I could easily see in 2 years time people turning around and saying "What do you MEAN Amazon has been ordering more expensive versions of products when I use the Echo" or "What do you mean Google showed me adverts for Ron Paul because I keep asking it about chem trails".
The power of the information collected by these devices is incredibly far reaching, and incredibly profitable, and at the moment most people aren't really capable of giving informed consent.
Unfortunately, my room mate bought two of them anyway, and so I've spent the last 6 months unplugging one of them every time I go to the bathroom.
By the way, they also aggressively throw multicast traffic around your network and upload at least 10 megabytes an hour to google even when idle.
My current speculation is that they are tracking android and possibly non-android devices as they move from network to network so they can better map who knows who.
To be honest, I just fucking hate it. When companies turn a product into a service, they can afford selling entry package at a loss, thus driving out competitors who sell products as products. Suddenly, you have yet another thing for which you need recurring payments (instead of one-time), and which will only work as long as the provider likes it. You lose freedom and control.
Saved my butt two days ago. Son graduation was at an arena in the city and walking by the GH and asked drive time to find over 2x than normal.
Apparently a MLB baseball game that started 15 minutes after his graduation start time.
Usually traffic is out of the city not in. Thanks to Google made it in time. What is also cool is the arena name is a hard name to pronounce as named after someone who gave money to the University yet Google still got it on first try. Alexa and Siri can't handle such things.
But have zero problem with you not wanting one as it is a personal choice.
And out of curiosity I asked: Alexa, can you laugh?
"Sure, I can laugh. Ti-hi".
As soon as these devices become very useful, people will jump on them.
I would buy one too, but atm I think the technology is not yet there.
The thing that I find ridiculous is that you kind think are superior or in a position to judge other people for buying this tech. haha
Me: "Hey Alexa, what's the weather?"
Alexa: gives the full weather report
Me: "Hey Alexa, what's the high today?"
Alexa: gives the full weather report
Me: "Hey Alexa, is it supposed to be sunny today?"
Alexa: gives full weather report
Me: "Hey Google, what's the high today?"
Google: "The high temperature in your location is predicted to be 82"
Me: "Hey Google, is it going to rain today?"
Google: "No, it's not forecasted to rain."
I've had an Alexa for over a year now and it's never changed or gotten "smarter" towards any of my questions. Eventually I just gave up and switched.
Me: "Alexa, tell Harmony to tune to CNN"
Alexa: turns on the TV, and tunes it to CNN.
Me: "Alexa, what alarms do I have set?"
Alexa: tells me I have a weekday alarm set for 5:30 AM
Me: "Alexa, set the bedroom temperature to 75 degrees"
Alexa: sets the temp to 75 degrees in the bedroom
Me: "Alexa, turn on the great room"
Alexa: turns on the great room lights
Me: "Alexa, turn off the office light"
Alexa: turns off my study lights
Me: "Alexa, turn on the whole house"
Alexa: turns turns on every light in the house
Skill integrations include: Harmony, Lutron, etc. YYMV. But we have one Alexa device in every room (8 devices total) and our biggest issue is waking her up when talking "about" her.
Plus, the product placement of echo devices gave Amazon a free run until Google Home happened.
Still, what Amazon pulled of against an algorithm company like Google is still impressive.
The Home Mini has been $20 several times (inc. black Friday), $80 for three at Costco, or nearly free (e.g. spend $125 on Google Express right now and get one included). I paid only $64 for my Google Home for example (new from eBay).
My point is, if you follow deal sites Google has had back to back sales almost since they launched. The $50/$130 prices for the Mini/Home respectively are largely fiction.
So yes, it doesn't hurt. In fact, it quite clearly helps a ton.
Does that make them pound for pound competitive with one another? No of course not. But consumers are not necessarily buying one or the other on a price basis. Alexa got there earlier. Google has to do something to overcome that hurdle.. being practically free or getting stuffed into something else for free is a successful way to overcome.
Now imagine coming into this arena with none of those integrations. Your system can answer some questions about the weather. It can tell you that your Imap mail account has 3 new messages. Everything else, you've got to do the engineering work yourself to integrate, while Google and Amazon just publish APIs.
I think you could argue Walmart was primarily competing with mom and pop stores a decade ago (though really other large supermarkets at that point), but they are most certainly competing with amazon today.
People would suddenly start to care if the entity enjoys a large enough market share to make them a monopoly.
Interestingly Amazon seems to be staying out of that end. I wonder if they are waiting it out - Echo was kind of a surprise success originally after all.
The line literally wrapped around the block in Hayes Valley.
You're the product. They sell everything you say, the microphone never turns off.
1. Google responds more to my command with slightly (not much) more natural tones;
2. Google recipe for cooking (I tried only once) is tremendously more helpful with waits and timers automatically added on;
3. Alexa has better sound for music although I only listen for working background not for serious music listening;
4. If you ask Google to say hi to Alexa it does whilst Alexa would say a long blurb about your contact skill is not available blah blah. But she responds to Google's greetings;
5. Calling "Alexa" is just easier than calling two words "hey google";
6. When Alexa skills work, they are awesome but it really is annoying to remember all the cues for skill names which i don't.
Overall, they are both very limited still. Right now I use Google a little bit more. It probably also helps that Google knows everything about me given I work in front computers all day but not so much with Amazon.
Does Google have too many inventories on hand, or do they really, really want people to put one in their homes no matter what the cost?
The real reason is the land-grab. People are unlikely to have multiple vendors devices.
The models are moderately good at basic speech to text and some grammatical parsing. But there is a lot more to go. The simplicity of the command set isn't an indicator of their aspirations. You'd eventually want a system capable of understanding any utterance by any human, at least as good as any other human. And certainly not just in command syntax.
They're super commodity hardware -- tust a WiFi chip, a speaker, a mic, and some other off-the-shelf components. It seems like the profit margins would be high at full retail price. Remember that the tech companies don't care about recouping their R&D costs, they just want to get these things into homes essentially at cost. Economies of scale really kick into play when you're making millions.
Which is exactly what's happening:
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/03/09/amazon-alexa-follow-up-...
On the other hand, the Alexa devices have a lot more apps, and I think that's in part because it's so much easier to build apps for it, mainly because they have a lot of scaffolding in AWS for it. I've even built a few of my own.
Apple is probably the best example of a company that realises the opportunity of building a supply chain that can satisfy the demand of their goods on a global level.
The EU is great, a lot of regulations have been standardised, but it's still a place with 24 different languages, twelve different currencies, different national systems (e.g. payment systems, shipping, retail outlets, marketing channels), culture etc. It's still very much a fragmented place. So the UK, France, Germany, Italy are still to a substantial extent separate markets, all of which are less than a quarter the size of the US.
Japan probably comes closest to the US.
Then there's China, it has the gdp, but not the gdp per capita. You can take $50 a day as a threshold for the type of targeted consumer class for example, that's about $18k a year. If you look at income distributions in China you'll find only about 10 million Chinese qualify. If you take a $20 a day / $7k a year figure, you get to about 100 million people. Japan is similar, around 100m. The US figure for this group is 300 million.
I mean don't get me wrong, you can't only have a US-focus. But I hardly see any companies do that. Instead they do first-launches in key markets and expand later on, and that makes sense.
Some data from Pew: https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/
China is a better market to be in to maximise profitability as the Chinese are more likely to fork out USD 799 for a phone than the Indians. It's almost mind-boggling how one company can capture so much share of profits.
Both Google and Amazon are aggressively expanding overseas with their assistants. Amazon is putting the Echo in 80 countries:
https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-bringing-echo-alexa-80-...
(Story time: As someone who had to find creative means to get SO many US-only goods into Canada, even ages after their US release, this is terrible with electronics. Shure headphones were the worst, where there was no Canadian distributor, so I ended up special-ordering through an audiology clinic.)
I also wish Google Home wasn't made by Google -- because well I'm anti-Google owning everything.
"Why would people voluntarily bug their own house??"
I prefer the Echo, over the Google Home for its depth of capabilities, wide smart-home device support, ability to play the most popular music streaming services, and slightly superior sound quality.
In addition to its built-in features, the Alexa platform includes a growing list (more than 15,000 at last count) of “Skills,” akin to apps on a smartphone, that unlock capabilities such as reading recipes, ordering pizza, or calling an Uber. Not all of its Skills are useful, but the Echo still does far more than the Google Home does.
The Echo is not the all-capable computer from Star Trek, but it is a smart digital assistant that’s constantly improving as Amazon adds more abilities to it.
Anyway, you do think it's fine to put a device that -on a bit-flip- is able to record and analyze anything you say and inject ads to your daily routine anywhere and this bit-flip can be done anytime because it is connected and updated through the internet without any interaction. We should trust the makers because reasons. What can go wrong, right?
And all this privacy breach is justified for the convinience of not getting up from the sofa to order a pizza.
I don't even.
Like a phone, tablet, laptop, Nest, etc etc? I’m not saying it’s OK, but Home was hardly the first mover here.
> and inject ads to your daily routine anywhere
This hasn’t happened to me, once. I can and probably throw my Homes in the bin the day they start doing this.
> and this bit-flip can be done anytime because it is connected and updated through the internet without any interaction.
Like the web browser you type all your concerns, medical symptoms, dinner ideas, street addresses, thoughts into completely voluntarily?
I’d argue that people tell google far far more confidential information via search than they ever will say out loud.
> I’d argue that people tell google far far more confidential information via search than they ever will say out loud.
This last point made me somehow reconsider my stance. The profiles already built up by search queries and gmails are probably more accurate already than it will ever be with GH, it will be just another few datapoints to more accurately describe a random person. But I still think it's inane to put another channel in our daily lives by these devices.
I don't find it all that unbelievable. Convenience is a hell of a drug, and the practical negative impact on someone's life from this kind of service is...what exactly?
For this I have to give in a lot of my privacy and hope that I can trust the device/software manufacturers - meanwhile prevent what I can.
What does google home or amazon echo brings to my life that is so ground breaking that I need another data-gathering device? I may come off as ignorant because I probably am. But I'll reconsider if somebody seriously can tell me how vastly these devices improved their life.
The killer feature for me is being able to add stuff to our family grocery list. It's so much better than opening an app, swiping around and typing on a tiny keyboard.
Once you get used to doing things via voice it's hard to go back.
What a convenient way to call other people shills without actually providing evidence.
edit: Can anyone name some other privacy respecting, non-cloud, open source platforms and devices to work with?
I have received mine yesterday but haven't had time to play around with it yet.
Amazon is now selling that data and surveillance technology to law enforcement, and Google to the military. I don't feel good about any of them "winning" in this market.
[citation needed]
Amazon: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/technology/amazon-facial-...
Google: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/google-helping-the-p...
White Christmas with Cookie?
At least half the use-cases for these things don't even need an internet connection, IMHO. Another significant chunk could be serviced by push-only data feeds and device-local search.
So the ability to talk to device, to get on the internet, to get weather forecast, news, music he likes (he obviously doesn't like modern music), get some videos from YouTube on TV screen or call someone is a revelation. Plus the fact that it just works and is really cheap.
Article says that's 56.3M projected sales worldwide.
From below link (from Mar 7), 47.3M U.S adults have access to a smart speaker. Or about 20% of all U.S. adults. Access meaning own or live with someone who owns one.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/07/47-3-million-u-s-adults-ha...
Everyone that bought a Pixel2 received a "free"//coupled Google Home, I'm wondering how did it impact those numbers?
I would never trust Google with that type of device in my home. Amazon I already feel better about it.