Bogdan's Shoutout #3 - Voice is everything, Alexa is not
Hola!
2019 is on and ready to rock. Same me, same my Monday Shoutout. Still sharing with you some interesting reads & facts.
I looked back and tried to remember one single thing that impressed me most in 2018 on the web. No doubt, it was Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri. I just watched again, and still makes sense. A lot of sense.
Speaking about the future now - CES is starting, with Google Assistant and Alexa as headliners. But before anything, CES is a show.
If Google is tripling its (already huge) presence by last year and wallpapering the whole Stripe into “Hey Google” ads, if Amazon is blasting with a “Works with Alexa” stamps on every home device, Apple is trolling with a huge mesh: “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone“.
You got the point, Apple is finger-pointing the weakness of the competition (mostly Alexa): privacy & security.
Speaking about Alexa, Dave Limp (the boss of the devices at Amazon) gave some very interesting points in a discussion with The Verge.
Amazon claims for 100 million Alexa devices. Huge. The voice assistant platform war is already over? But what’s about the billions of pre-installed Siri or Google Assistant, The Verge fairly asks…
For me, one very interesting thing is standing out: it seems that Amazon is not looking at AVS and Alexa as a voice assistant platform. Is something bigger, something that is very aligned with Jeff Bezos’s personality too: having all, the whole food on the table, not just a bowl of soup.
Limp’s response is that he’s not actually interested in competing directly with “assistants” as a category. He focused on a bigger goal. The platform war isn’t for a voice interface to set timers and turn on your lights. It’s for, as Walt Mossberg has called it, “ambient computing.”
Anyhow, it will be a very interesting year. Let’s enjoy it and play the game…
Luv y’all
Bogdan
The blurb
Mainstream agile sucks! Everyone knows it but few admit it. It’s a fallacy of a paradigm or methodology. And in practice a misinterpretation of a simple manifesto. —> Agile Sucks and Everyone Knows It!
Intellectual humility is simply “the recognition that the things you believe in might in fact be wrong,” —> Intellectual humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong
A machine learning agent intended to transform aerial images into street maps and back was found to be cheating by hiding information. —> This clever AI hid data from its creators to cheat at its appointed task
The most brilliant and creative amongst us are sometimes the most troubled, and nowhere is that clearer than in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. —> Investors and entrepreneurs need to address the mental health crisis in startups