Without global influence, Amazon Alexa's dominance of the smart home is fragile

American technology media CNET recently wrote that Amazon Alexa, which shined at CES , has been in high spirits recently, as if it had won the battle of smart home and voice assistant overnight. However, foreign media believes that this victory is only temporary, and Alexa, which lacks global influence, is very fragile and its throne can be easily taken away by competitors.

At this year's CES, if we talk about the real star products, I'm afraid there is no one that dares to compete with Amazon Alexa. Its soul has almost possessed various devices from mobile phones to cars. Amazon has created a new industry standard in the smart home and voice assistant fields.

This statement is not intended to be exaggerated, but it must be followed by a qualifier - the US and UK markets. If you live in a country where Echo is not sold, Alexa is just a name in the news to you.

I'm not saying this out of sour grapes, because if Alexa wants to gain absolute dominance in the smart home space, it will be very important to have global influence in the future. Just serving one or two markets will not help Alexa keep its throne.

Today, Amazon Alexa is only available in the US and UK markets. This is not because Bezos is conservative, but because if Alexa wants to make money, it must be integrated with Amazon's services (such as helping users order products on local Amazon).

If you are in Australia, you can't buy many Amazon products because it's too troublesome to ship from the United States. There are only Kindle, Audible and Amazon Prime video services here, and in order to bring the entire Alexa experience over, Amazon must invest heavily in warehouses and other infrastructure in Australia, and it is really not cost-effective to go to such lengths just to sell a few Echo speakers.

The essence of smart home platform is not to sell a few specific services and products, but to seamlessly connect home appliances, lights and other products, so that people can control home appliances or get weather, news and other information at any time. Amazon Alexa has done well in these aspects, so for hardware manufacturers, Alexa is a very easy platform to integrate, so they have extended olive branches to Alexa. However, once outside the UK and the US, hardware manufacturers will immediately ignore Alexa.

Therefore, Alexa's dominance is very fragile. After all, it is just a piece of software, and it is easy for hardware manufacturers to replace it. At the same time, Amazon does not actually control these manufacturers. They are just partners. Once there is a new product that surpasses Alexa, everyone will immediately turn their guns around, and the speed may be faster than everyone supporting Alexa at this year's CES.

This is not my imagination. Four months ago at IFA, LG announced that its smart refrigerators would support Microsoft Cortana, but times have changed. At CES, these refrigerators have been replaced with Alexa. These refrigerators will indeed be equipped with Alexa when sold in the United States, but outside the US market, it may be replaced with Cortana or LG's own webOS.

Lenovo's smart assistant speaker is also a good example. In the United States, it uses Alexa, but in China, its internal voice assistant is replaced by AISpeech.

This is probably a big problem that troubles Amazon. Are they willing to promote Alexa to the world without services and products? Although such Alexa will be dumber, some basic functions are still very useful. Most importantly, this move can help Amazon establish its leading advantage in the voice assistant industry.

It is worth noting that many die-hard fans of Alexa have bought Echo overseas to use at home, but they found that they still have to go through a lot of trouble to play it smoothly. First of all, in order to make it work properly, you have to adjust the time to the US or UK time zone, which is not only troublesome to use, but also very unstable.

When Amazon launched Echo in the UK, it did a lot of localization work. The accent and culture of the speaker were specially adjusted for British users. Such localization work is quite complicated, and it costs a lot of money and an immeasurable amount of time. In this context, I am afraid that any company would be daunted by global promotion.

If Amazon sticks to the US and UK, its rivals will have an opportunity to take advantage. After all, for smart home products, installed base is everything. If a platform has no users, developers will quickly forget about it.

In fact, the smart home market has been in a tepid state in recent years, because the products on the market do not have attractive selling points. However, Alexa has unexpectedly emerged, which has once again ignited the enthusiasm of the market, and competitors have entered the market one after another. For many manufacturers in the market, if they don't seize the time, they will soon be forgotten. However, the door to the smart home market will not be closed, because more and more people in the world are eager to make their homes smart.

Finally, we have to thank Alexa for its contribution to the smart home industry. Under its guidance, the popularity of such products is accelerating.

However, it remains to be seen whether Alexa can have the last laugh, because its dominance is too fragile at this stage.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.