Hello Automators. Thanks for tuning in again i'm back with another 2018
smart home year in review, and quite obviously from all the products around
you or around me rather, we're here to talk about the Amazon Echo and their
voice assistant and all of the new products new features new upgrades that
they put out here in 2018 so let's get going now of course with this review of
the year in general at the end what I'm going to give you is a grading for
Amazon in the end as it relates to smart home home automation and in general
automating your life the year for Amazon comes down to just a few incidents or
events here that occurred to me and the biggest one was really their hardware
event late in the year where they introduced 21 new products and you're
seeing some of them on the table here not all of them the Echo Dot 3rd
generation the second generation of the Echo Plus the brand new Echo Sub here and the
second generation of the Echo Show we're all prime products that were released
here by Amazon in 2018. Now some additional products that maybe aren't on
everyone's radar but we're interesting expansions as far as I'm concerned you
know the Echo Auto we'd seen some other makers produce the Amazon voice
assistant onboard a device that went in the car but now Amazon has their own
there's also the Echo input which is basically a Chromecast Audio if you're
familiar with the Google product suite here and really you know from there you
have the lake the Echo Link which is intended to tie into receivers the link
amp which is intended to be its own kind of and you know just a ton of other
products like the clock and the microwave things like that that came out
that really shifted the paradigm of what we expected from a smart home product
another product they released here was the Amazon smart plug and I've used it a
few times on the channel now and I put it in a couple of demos but ultimately
what this signifies to me is amazon is going to follow the same
approach that they follow on their amazon basics and the microwaves another
example of this what they do with those Amazon basics products is they basically
replace the best-selling item on Amazon with their own so they go they see
someone making a lot of money and they go and they take that space now there
were a ton of and are still are a lot of smart plug manufacturers and creators
but Amazon has gone and tried to take away that market and that is what they
are very very good at and that also brings more people into the Echo suite
of products. The other thing we saw over 2018 you know the Fire TV Cube and the
Fire TV Recast those are really interesting products we also saw great improvements
with the fire tablets as well so those really grew in terms of capability they
started to get their voice assistant on board and they started to look much more
like smart displays over 2018 in terms of expansion you know Amazon was out
there and they had over 40 countries with the capability of buying an Amazon
Echo product and that started in 2017 now they've since expanded in some
websites say they're in 80 countries and other state say they're still around
that 40 number but where they haven't really upgraded and they did a little
bit of this this year you know we saw them going to France and Spain and
Mexico Italy as well they went into those countries this year with a much
fuller rollout and what I mean by that is they started to get the language and
they localized as well so you know really when we get right down to it
Amazon only has a few languages you know you can add English, German, Japanese to
those languages I already mentioned and then otherwise the voice assistant
doesn't come in any additional languages so relative to some of their competitors
which I'll talk about a little bit later they didn't expand a ton in terms of
language capability they sell their product in a lot of places but it's not
localized for the people who live in terms of expansion on the other side
though when we talk about some of their capabilities and we get into what the
devices can do now and the voice assistant can do you know they went from
4,000 connected devices and services to over 20,000 later in the year and
they're well over that now there's over 50,000 skills now in that Amazon voice
assistant store there so those are incredible expansions in 2018 and that
gives a ton of capability and that's what Amazon is relying on in a lot of
cases but they've also opened up their device to a ton of developers and so
they're relying on the community to develop just as much but they're putting
out these api's are these developer kits to allow people and companies to build
off of and that's where they really really succeeded in 2018 and just to
give you a few examples you know this was a little thing but it opened up a
lot of doors for them the contact a motion sensor API that they put out late
in the year allows people with in skills now to utilize the motion sensors in the
contact sensor so you can have skills that now rely on that and obviously over
the year we saw the routines capability improve with Amazon utilizing dot API so
they were able to add in these devices ZigBee type of devices or contact and
motion sensors in general later on in the air to your routine some of those
other things that they built you know there's a whole new API for cameras and
this allows you know companies like wise camp to go and get fully integrated
allow two-way communication all within the Echo suite of devices so that's
going to mean you're smart displays obviously when you're talking about
seeing what's going on with your camera on say a service likewise cam and it's
going to allow a lot more companies to have better and deeper integration in
into basically the ecosystem we they're cameras and that also applies to
doorbells as well so that API was for both cameras and smart doorbells another
couple of late year api's you know they have a security panel API so that's
going to allow companies that already have a security panel in your home to
update that device and then go ahead and connect in with your Echo devices now on
top of that you think about music streaming well that's been opened up as
well and allows companies to develop skills for their music service without
creating a whole default connection like you know Apple Music did here late in
the year so there's just been an incredible expansion of the ability to
create skills and the functions that you're going to have access to and this
extends all the way down to users just like you and I who aren't programming
anything and the example of that is Amazon blueprints so that was the
ability to create your own skills they were relatively basic but that came to
us here in 2018 in a big way and you were able to go and create your own
skills so big improvements in terms of accessibility some other service
capabilities that came out you know you look at Amazon key which also included
the ability to go ahead and have packages deliver to your car so Amazon
key allowed with certain smart home locks to allow Amazon to put the package
inside your home which is a big deal right now with a lot of people going out
and stealing packages on top of this we've seen this Amazon guard service
start to be talked about and start to be built into the next generation of
devices so you're going to be able to essentially have monitoring through your
Echo devices so they're really shifting how much these devices can do and that's
all started in 2018 so let's talk a little bit about the functions that
really just came right into the Echo devices and we'll start with music here
you know you go to Apple music late in the year this is a huge request from a
North American market standpoint Apple music is
the biggest services obviously Spotify is kind of carrying number one but
Amazon already has Spotify on the list of connected music services so to get
Apple and Spotify they're really hammering home that they're ahead of
Google on this and really still ahead of Apple on desk that's a big deal they
also added some functionality you know Amazon music got playlist management
there's an equaliser capability and then on top of that you're able to cast which
started to pair later in the year with the speaker pairing capability that
showed up so if you have to Echo Dots or to Echo Plus or two Echoes you can go
ahead and create a 2.1 system with the Echo Sub and of course you can still
create the left and right stereo pairing channel in general so all of that you
know you think about where we were in multi-room audio and you know you were
able to do a few things there in terms of multi-room audio but now with the
speaker pairing i know it doesn't have Bluetooth I know it's not connected to
everything but now with Apple Music integration that's a lot of music
services and a lot of capability on stereo pairing and a lot of capability
on music in general just showing up in 2018 the next big thing I want to talk
about I'll quickly throw in SMS messaging in on Android in the u.s.
showed up early in the year and really hasn't been expanded since but that
capability is the first of its kind doesn't exist on any other service
basically here in the smart home you know you're able to do a couple of
things with services like if this than that but ultimately it's the only of its
kind now the big thing that I want to talk about is the growth in routines and
really this is the growth in smart home capabilities in general and that's what
Amazon hit hard on their devices this year so when you think about early in
the year you know device triggers those those
triggers the you know Echo Button triggers things like that that came
earlier on in the error lots of those capabilities came earlier in the
but what started to happen later in the year you know we just saw location-based
reminders or location-based routines rather you know those really drive
different capabilities or different functionality with your routines and I
think that that again pushes them way ahead of Google and it's something I
talked about in my 20 18 Google here in review which I'll put up in the top
right corner right now if you want to go watch that video as well but you know
the routine growth just on the trigger side really created home and life
automation for what I'll say the first time in one of these smart assistant
speakers you know and when you add in the resulting actions that they added
here in 2018 the ability to create that automation is incredible and just from a
simple thing like the ability to wait and that's an action that I think I'm
gonna spend a lot of time on in 2019 to be honest because it can do so much in
terms of creating one routine and one automation and then having it really
Drive a lot of things in your life you know you think about taking a nap or you
think about scheduling a workout and you can do all of those things with one
routine now really set the scene execute and then you know and and then close it
off however you want and turn that scene off so all kinds of capability with
simple things like wait another major thing to talk about and this kind of
snuck in later in the year but we saw Amazon making all kinds of business
arrangements we saw the latest with Apple and Apple music that is what
Amazon has been so good at as well and the biggest one this year is probably
Microsoft and what we saw is Cortana and Amazon's voice assistant integration
almost entirely now on all of these devices you can go ahead and get Cortana
the other thing we saw and this is the the reverse of that the Amazon voice
assistant is now on Windows 10 so you can go ahead you can get that and you
can start to integrated into how you work with your
computer or your PC now so you know we saw Microsoft sell the products now
they're selling Echo devices we're seeing better integration with email and
really over time this is bearing more and more fruit for Amazon and Microsoft
really on that note Skype integration occurred very very late here in the year
and that kind of turns us over to the smart displays where we also had that
camera those visuals really start early on in the year on in terms of cameras
showing basically what's happening in your home and really deep integration
continuing throughout the year so we have great smart display integration for
those doorbells with a camera and some of the some of the cameras in general
the smart home camera is obviously better integration with brands like ring
and Arlo but we saw things like canary show up in in the voice assist in here
and on those smart displays on top of that I talked about the Fire HD tablets
you know you have the hands-free mode where you're able to essentially use
them like smart displays and you can get the voice assistant there that's a big
change for such an inexpensive device and then on top of that we had a couple
little things like the whisper mode and those little integrations are changes
here with the Echo devices those are big improvements they're just changed the
way you use the device a little bit on a daily basis so ultimately that's a lot
of the big capabilities that I want to talk about there were obviously a lot of
other little things that I could talk about for hours here with Amazon and
their voice assistant now in terms of starting to kind of give you a grade
here for Amazon because really have been very positive throughout this and
there's a lot of reasons to be very positive amazon has made great business
deals all throughout the year that have improved these products they have
continued to upgrade things like you know this Echo Plus version one
is almost just as capable as the Echo Plus two there's very little
differential if any I can't think of any right now off the top of my head but you
know really they they didn't have to do that they just are even though there's
putting out these new versions of the products so that's really positive stuff
that creates trust and we'll talk about trust here in a little bit we talked
about those new skills you know 50,000 skills 20,000 products and services
connecting to these devices that massive massive growth they did get into some
new countries here with full localization as what I say and they are
working very hard to get into a market like India where they're using their
Clio capability to basically build that recognition of the language there and
and a number of localized languages there right so you know they're doing a
lot of good things that are setting up for 2019 in terms of localization and
building their languages and really making these devices more powerful
internationally so those are all very very positive things what I keep coming
back to though and this is where I start to turn a little bit negative with
Amazon's products they had a number of incidents over the year where their
voices system is basically listening to people when it shouldn't be it's
recording things when it shouldn't be and it's saying things that definitely
should be shouldn't be like go kill your foster parents now you know some of that
I would say is eroding trust and there's one other thing that I keep coming back
to as well and what's happened recently and people
keep saying I'm crazy I'm crazy I'm crazy as I say this to you but the
studies continue to show that Siri is ahead of Amazon's voice assistant in
terms of response and understanding what you're saying in general and how this
impacts Amazon a really overall impacts them I think greatly what what that does
is that erodes that trust a little more as well I mean you know
when I do demos for you guys I show you when it works but there are a lot of
times when I sit here and I go okay how do I actually say this and sometimes I
have to look it up I shouldn't have to do that I use these on a daily basis so
why am i having to look up how to put something into a list or how to put
something into a custom list or how to create a custom list why am I having to
look up those things it's because sometimes this device just doesn't get
it right and the voice assistant just
doesn't get it right to put this in perspective Siri is now above on every
study I've seen in the last two quarters and they're above by a few percentage
points and Google is way ahead usually upwards of 10 to 15% better on say a
study of four hundred to a thousand questions so that tells you a lot when
we're talking about gaining the trust of these devices so really that's my big
problem with Amazon they also created a little bit of confusion with you know
their 21 products that came out here I mean how do I know the difference
between the Echo Link and the Echo Link Amp that's you know that distinction is
going to be lost on a lot of people I can tell you what it is but people are
going to have to want to figure that out and they're going to have to want to
search that out so you know will everyone do that know do they want to
know why they need a clock from Amazon that has this voice assistant on board I
think people will struggle with that initially and so it's really up to
Amazon to tell that story and I don't think they've quite got there so those
are kind of my two main issues I mean obviously Amazon did some amazing things
this year let's let's not kid ourselves to put out that many products in the
smart home space and to create as many partnerships as they did in these new
services which include partnerships you know you think about the cars being
delivered to that took GMC 2015 and newer partner
with OnStar took a lot of things to do Amazon key in cars so incredible
incredible stuff but I really struggle in 2018 with their voice assistant not
improving despite all of these announcements where they say hey we're
improving and hey it's getting better here's how we're getting better we're
learning through this way it hasn't seen really any better to me in terms of a
final grade for Amazon here I gave Google a B overall in their year here in
terms of home automation in terms of automating your life now what do I give
Amazon this is actually something I've struggled a little bit with here now I'm
going to give them a B+ and ultimately it comes down to their partnerships that
they're creating not just with companies like Microsoft like we talked about not
just like companies like Apple but they're also creating partnerships with
developers through their release of these api's and these capabilities of
really developing new better skills for their whole ecosystem and as they do
that and they really connect with the developer community they are creating
better and better functionality for you in 2018 and now in 2019 and that's this
is one of the things I'm going to focus on here in 2019 is showing you some of
those skills some of those capabilities that really push these devices ahead
further and further and allow you to take full advantage of the capabilities
of these devices the one big thing for Amazon really to do is to get their
voice assistant up to where Google's is they need to catch up on languages they
need to catch up in terms of understanding and responding to all
kinds of things you know they have some real gaps on their voice assistant right
now and they need to plug those holes before I think ultimately they can hit
the next level so there you have it guys go ahead let me know down in the
comments that's what I'm giving Amazon this year and please look forward to my
2019 predictions here for the smart home and autumn home
automation space I'm going to give you my full look ahead for what I think
Amazon and Google and Apple and Samsung and lots of these big makers are going
to give us in 2019 and I think you'll you'll get a bit of a sense of where I
feel they're lacking and you know where I think they're headed here in this
video but ultimately look for that here this weekend and thanks again everyone
for watching and we'll see you next time
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