Amazon, streamed live from the Game Developers Conference Friday, showed viewers how to build an Alexa game skill. It boasted a voice-first riddle game created from “blank canvas” to fully planned in 7.5 hours. In the game, Alexa celebrates a right answer and corrects a wrong one, then tallies the number of correct answers at the end of the game, blogged Cami Williams, Alexa evangelist. The app isn’t all about voice: users can play against each other using Echo Buttons, tapping a button when they know the answer to a riddle, she said. In-skill purchasing allows players to buy packaged hints.

Xfinity created voice commands and smart bulb integration for the X1 remote corresponding to the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament, it said Wednesday. For the 19 days of the tournament, beginning Thursday, Xfinity customers with the X1 voice remote and either xFi internet or Xfinity home service can have a light show mapped to the 68 teams in the tournament, it said. The integration works with color-emitting bulbs from Lifx or Philips Hue, priced under $50 each, Xfinity said. After customers pair the bulbs with Xfinity Home or xFi and see colors kick in when certain phrases are said. It gave as an example of the less-than-spontaneous commands the phrase .“Xfinity Home, Go Villanova” to have bulbs automatically turn blue and light blue, the university’s colors. Other voice commands give access to standings, news, highlights and game summaries.

Josh.ai announced a collaboration with LG letting TV owners request specific content through LG displays. The integration applies to LG 2018 and 2019 OLED, Super UHD and UHD model sets. The LG televisions will be controllable via commands including “raise the volume” and “switch inputs to Roku,” said Josh.ai Tuesday, billing itself as a higher level voice control solution for the custom integrator channel. It also gave an example of a compound command possible through the collaboration: “Watch Stranger Things season 2 episode 3, turn up the volume on the TV, draw the shades 40%, and dim the lights a little.” Calling the setup process “intuitive” for integrators, the company said Josh auto-populates supported LG TVs and provides authorization instructions.

Amazon edged out Google in 2018 smart speaker shipments by a percentage point, Canalys reported Monday. Total 2018 industry shipments reached 78 million units worldwide, up 125 percent from the year before, with Amazon shipping 24.2 million Echo devices and Google shipping 23.4 million units in the Home line. Apple didn’t place in the top five, which included China vendors Alibaba (8.9 million), Xiaomi (7.1 million) and Baidu (3.6 million). Other manufacturers shipped a total 10.8 million. Echo’s holiday season refresh, with focus on sound and aesthetics, boosted its revenue by 31 percent over the year-ago quarter, said the researcher. For 2019, Amazon is expected to switch gears and extend Alexa’s reach into the automotive market via developers and device vendors, analyst Jason Low forecast, saying Amazon needs to support third-party companies in the Alexa ecosystem or risk “waning commitment.” Google’s $149 Home Hub smart display was a Q4 highlight with 2.2 million shipments, helping Google become the second largest smart display vendor for the year. Smart display shipments totaled 6.4 million units in 2018, for an 8.3 percent share of the smart speaker category. Estimating 80 percent of the global smart speaker market comprises ISPs and software companies, Low said Samsung, Huawei and Apple “failed to capitalize” on the growth of smart assistants in the home and risk falling further behind as voice assistant leaders expand penetration in vehicles and offices.

Qualcomm announced the first development kit for mesh Wi-Fi networks, qualified by Amazon, to integrate Amazon Alexa Voice Service. The kit gives manufacturers the building blocks to create mesh Wi-Fi systems with Alexa built-in quickly and cost effectively, so they can offer a voice control feature for connected devices, Qualcomm said Wednesday. The kit integrates Alexa with Meeami Technologies’ ClearVoice far-field voice enhancement software that’s said to allow voice commands to be understood from distances of several meters under noisy conditions. Qualcomm’s mesh networking platform, launched in 2017, added support for advanced voice services last year, and a “handful of device makers are starting to deliver on that promise,” blogged spokesperson Megan Wenholz Wednesday. The rise in popularity of digital assistants makes it “natural to converge all that functionality into one device,” she said of Alexa integration. A Qualcomm spokeswoman told us the company is supporting multiple voice assistant offerings across its various platforms and expects to continue to provide other platform-level ones, declining to comment on specific plans.

Savant announced compatibility between its control platform and Resideo’s Honeywell Home T Series smart thermostats, including voice control via Savant’s touch-screen Pro remote and Pro 8 app. A homeowner with a compatible Resideo smart thermostat can say, “I’m hot” or “I’m cold” into the Pro remote to trigger a 2-degree adjustment of the temperature setting, said the company. Users also can integrate climate adjustment into a programmed scene.

After reaching a third of U.S. homes at the end of 2018, smart speakers will see more than 64 million in sales by 2022, blogged Parks Associates Thursday. Voice is becoming a “key complement to smart home device adoption and ownership,” providing a simple way to interact with devices and creating the opportunity for a centralized user interface in the connected home, said analyst Dina Abdelrazik. The next step will be “integration of voice among multiple device categories,” which will help reduce smart home fragmentation, she said. Voice control of smart home devices is on the rise, with 21 percent of smart home owners having used voice to power devices on and off, 18 percent to check a device’s status, said Parks. With voice popularity and use cases expanding, device makers and service providers are looking to capitalize on the market opportunity by integrating voice with their current offerings, either by creating a proprietary technology or integrating with an available one. Amazon and Google have made it easier for companies to bring voice-based solutions to market “while creating competition for consumer mindshare," Abdelrazik said, and Apple and Samsung are promoting their own solutions in the increasingly crowded market.

Crestron debuted a new user interface designed for the TSR-310 handheld touch remote, at ISE 2019 in Amsterdam last week. The pre-built UI cuts down on programming time and includes a voice command interface. New features include transitions and animations, it said.

Best Buy pushed online ordering interactions via Alexa in a Thursday email to customers. Though the email referenced Alexa only, the “learn how” link took customers to a page with both Alexa and Google Home instructions for communicating with the retailer's e-commerce site from a smart speaker. It differentiated instructions for the two, saying Google Assistant uses “actions” to find information and Alexa uses “skills.” It instructed users to click “explore” on the Assistant app to search for the Best Buy action. An optional second step is to complete the linking process in the app by signing into your Best Buy account, required for order tracking. The third step is to say, “Hey, Google. Talk to Best Buy.” It gave examples of commands to “buy headphones from Best Buy,” ask for store hours; ask about Total Tech Support; and request order status. For Alexa users, in addition to asking about order tracking and Total Tech support, it said to ask Alexa about voice-only deals and to research products. We communicated with both Google Assistant and Alexa. Cadences remain a problem, we found. Sony noise-canceling headphones in black came across as “Sony black-noise canceling headphones” in Google Assistant-speak. We had to get the trigger phrase just right. We asked Alexa, “What are the Best Buy deals?” and she responded: “It looks like Amazon doesn’t sell Best Buy.” When we said, “ask Best Buy about voice-only deals,” she gave four offers. Google, too, required perfect syntax. Alexa gave us a mishmash of four product deals: a Garmin smartwatch ($199), a PhunkeeDuck self-balancing scooter ($299), a two-pack of Aluratek Bluetooth speakers ($20) and an Insignia NS-CAHBTEBNC-S noise-canceling headphone for $35. Alexa appeared to try to pronounce the headphones’ model number as a word, requiring yet another trip to the website: most pronunciations weren’t clear enough for us to understand what we were being offered.

Amazon Echo has 70 percent of the U.S. installed base of smart speakers, followed by Google Home with 24 percent and Apple HomePod at 6 percent, reported Consumer Intelligence Research Partners Tuesday. The U.S. installed base of smart speaker devices is 66 million units, up from 53 million at the end of September and 36 million in Q4 2017, it said. Holiday shoppers “helped the smart speaker market take off again,” said analyst Josh Lowitz. Market share has remained consistent among the top three players, even as Amazon and Google broaden product lines. Apple’s share will remain limited “until it offers an entry-level product closer to Echo Dot and Home mini,” Lowitz said. Smart speaker owners continue to add to their speaker families, with 35 percent of all owners having more than one device at the end of December vs. 18 percent a year earlier, it said. Google has caught up to Amazon in convincing owners to use smart speakers in multiple rooms, said analyst Mike Levin. A year ago, almost twice as many Echo users as Google owners had multiple units; now, a third of each platform’s users have more than one. Findings were based on a survey of 500 owners of Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod speakers Jan.1-11. Parks Associates said Tuesday that 97 percent of smart speaker households own only one brand, with two-thirds owning an Echo device and roughly a third owning Google Home. The trend of brand loyalty in the early market creates opportunities for device makers to upsell premium products, it said. Consumers who spent over $1,000 in the past 12 months on CE products -- and plan to buy products over the next year -- list smart speakers among their intended buys, along with laptops, TVs, streaming media players and sound bars, said Parks. "Smart speaker owners are increasingly adopting multiple devices in various rooms of the household, said analyst Kristen Hanich, and device makers can “leverage this tendency toward repeat and extra purchases to bundle new and premium products with smart speaker sales."