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Is The Future Bright For Alexa And Does Amazon Need To Make A HomePod?

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A few days ago, I met with David Limp,Amazon’s Senior Vice President for Devices and Services. Back in January at CES, the electronics show in Las Vegas, there had been scores of products which boasted that they had built in Alexa, the voice-activated personal assistant who dwells in the Echo.

So I asked David Limp about her. No doubt he had confidence she would succeed but did even Amazon know just how successful Alexa would be?

‘No. You know, whenever you take a leap of faith into what is uncharted territory you’re inventing something new, it has risks. And one of the things I love about Amazon is we encourage everybody at the company to take big risks because that’s when you really get big outcomes as well. But you also have an equal or maybe even greater chance of failure. Because you wouldn’t be inventing without the risk of failure.’

What about the Fire Phone?

Like the Fire Phone, perhaps which really didn’t take off. ‘Both those products, Fire Phone and Echo, had lots of invention in them. We had one of the first autofocus cameras on the back side of that product. But then it’s kind of up to customers to decide which resonates with them. They told us on the phone that it wasn’t differentiated enough from the others that were out there to kind of rise to the top.’

Of course, the most important thing when things don’t work is to learn from that. Certainly, early adopters of the Fire Phone found their product improved quickly and substantially – in a very short time, Amazon pushed out over 100 updates to the phone.

But what’s the ultimate goal with Alexa? Well, it’s tough to get a hint of the future from product executives but Limp has a game plan.

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Amazon and Star Trek

‘We work backwards from the Star Trek computer. For those who remember the Star Trek computer, it was Gene Roddenberry's vision of what we like to think now of ambient computing. That is, you could be anywhere on the Starship Enterprise, say the wake word, the name ‘Computer’, and the computer would wake up and you could ask her anything and you could never really stump her. She was pretty good across the board and answered everything. And so we envisioned a world where we can recreate that as well. We're well on the way: we can say Alexa, she'll wake up and you can ask her questions and we just have to get better at answering everything. And with time and with iteration and with these modern algorithms we think we can continue to get better.’

For now, Alexa is great at telling you a joke, setting a timer, and so on. If I ask ‘What is the meaning of life?’ I’ll get a jokey answer. I just tried this and the answer was ‘42’, a reference which all ‘Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy’ fans will recognize. But one day, will Alexa have enough philosophical knowledge to give me a more serious answer?

Limp says, “Well, it'll be an iterative process over years, to get to that end game and it is already happening. You know, compared to just a year ago she is much smarter now. The other day the Open Championship was on. A year ago we didn't know golf scores. This time she gave me a great description of what the leaderboard looked like. But it's really every single thing she is good at gets better over time. Take smart home: when we launched the product she had no capabilities for a smart home. But we saw it resonating with customers and now we've added more skills, she can do lights and locks and thermostats. And most recently we launched TVs, audio-visual receivers and just last week we launched cameras. She's gotten significantly better over the course of time. And each one of those kind of lanes gets deep and she gets richer every day.”

What about Apple HomePod?

Apple’s HomePod is due to be released later this year, and is described as a smart speaker geared to revolutionizing home music playback. Does Amazon feel threatened that Amazon hasn’t built its own hi-fi speaker?

‘I’ll argue the case that we’ve already done it. What I mean by that is, when we look at the speakers we sell on Amazon, I’m always surprised by the variety of the speakers that customers like. We all have different music taste. You may like rock n roll and like the thump. Someone else may like jazz and love really good mid ranges and a third person might like classical and they want to have the great the great treble and high notes and no two people are the same. So, one of the reasons we invented and delivered Echo Dot, in addition to getting it under $50 so you could put it in every room was to give customers choice of the speaker they want to connect it to. And so if you’re a high-end customer or you like the bass or whatever, that’s fine, you can just connect any speaker you want. And there are customers, I’m sure, that have connected tens of thousands of dollars speakers and I’m sure they sound like Symphony Hall. That’s what we want to do. We want to get a lot of choice and selection to customers. And so as opposed to predicting the one that everybody will like. We’d rather build one that works with as many speakers as possible.’

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And what about the future?

‘You know, our job I think as technologists is to see what technologies are up and coming and put those puzzle pieces together on behalf of customers because they don’t have the front row seat that we do of the new things that are coming. It’s our job to put those together in interesting ways and then propose them in the form of products to customers and see if they resonate. And if they start resonating, iterate quickly and get them better and better.’

The difference with Echo Show

The latest Echo gadget is the Echo Show, which has a display on it. What's so special about that?

'When we decided to add a screen to Echo we really spent a lot of time thinking about what the UI should be for that ambient screen. And we even tried some versions of our tablet user interface and I can tell you it was not good because you don’t want to have to run across the room to touch something or squint and so everything has to be visible from seven feet away. We use larger fonts. It has to work equally as well if you’re facing the stove cooking pasta and listening to her as if you glanced over and saw it. So a lot of what the user interface does is present additional information. I could ask what the weather is in London. Voice-wise, we read off a pretty short answer. But if you have the screen then at the end it will, in a beautiful way, show you the five-day forecast. Another example: Echo Show plays music just as well as today’s Echo does but if you’re watching the screen the lyrics will be scrolling in synchronization with that. It’s just delightful.'

Where do Amazon's ideas come from?

Amazon develops its products in an intriguing way which reveals something else about Amazon’s future.

‘At Amazon, ideas can come from anywhere. They might come from customers or staff from every level. The process is to take that lightbulb moment and articulate it to something that we resource and fund and green light. We call it the working backwards process inside of Amazon. For any new product, we write a press release as if we were announcing it – it’s just a concept but we write the press release and then we vigorously debate internally. Is there value in that and differentiation for the customer? If the answer is yes then we green light it and hire a team.’

Does that run the risk that some products just won’t be able to be realized as products?

‘Oh sure. There’s lots of things that never get to see the light of day because they’re unobtainium. There’s some that take a lot time to happen. Our original vision of Echo was to release it in maybe a year and a half we thought. It took more like three and a half.You can’t put a timeline on invention. But I think it’s a great process because it starts with the customer. If you build something that you think the customer will want even if it sometimes takes longer than you think it will, it generally works out pretty well.’

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