Josh.ai received $11 million in Series A funding to be used to expand its team, distribution and hardware and software offerings “with a focus on privacy,” said the company Thursday. The Josh.ai system allows clients to choose to store data locally for a period of time to assist in learning, or not to store commands at all, it said.
Xfinity expanded its integration with Tiles to help customers locate lost Tiles attached to wallets, keys and other misplaced items. Tiles can connect to xFi gateways and Bluetooth-equipped set-top boxes to find lost items nearby, it blogged Monday. Customers can now ring their Tiles by saying things like, “Xfinity Home, find my keys,” it said.
Amazon’s Echo device has a two- to three-times higher penetration in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, with slightly lower penetration in Japan, Cowen's John Blackledge wrote investors Wednesday. Some 55% of those surveyed say they use Echo multiple times a day for music (more than 75%), requesting information (68%), smart home tasks (32%), adding to shopping lists (27%) and ordering food (11%), reported the analyst. He attributes Amazon’s higher penetration for Echo vs. Google Home to its first-mover advantage, better distribution and its ability to leverage the Prime service. Echo has 31% U.S. household penetration; 40% of U.S. Prime households owned an Echo device in December vs. 15% of non-Prime households.
Some 147 million smart speakers sold worldwide in 2019, a 70 percent bump over the previous year, reported Strategy Analytics Thursday. Amazon held onto its lead with 26.2 percent share, but that was down from 33.7 percent in 2018. Google’s share also dropped from 25.9 percent to 20.3 percent, while Chinese vendors Baidu, Alibaba and Xiaomi gained share. Apple remained in sixth place 4.7 percent, it said. Q4’s 55.7 million units were a high for the category, driven by holiday sales in the U.S. and Europe, and a recovery in Google’s smart speaker business after new product intros, improved components supply and promotions with YouTube and Spotify, said the researcher. SA expects another record year for the segment in 2020, despite a near-term impact from the coronavirus.
Forty percent of U.S. smart speaker owners use the devices to control a TV, streaming player or other video device by voice at least once a week, reported Strategy Analytics Monday. The most common uses for voice-controlling a TV are for power on and off, changing volume and searching for a show, said the researcher. Smart speakers are making the TV easier to use and video services easier to find, said analyst David Watkins. About 75 million people use smart speakers in the U.S., SA said. The survey of 1,136 smart speaker users was fielded July-August.
Sensory announced a domain-specific voice assistant for smart appliances Tuesday. A specialized version of TrulyNatural -- a large-vocabulary speech recognition and natural language understanding platform -- is designed to help appliance makers develop smart kitchen products that don’t rely on relaying voice requests to the cloud, said the company. Citing concerns over privacy, Sensory said TrulyNatural’s user interface keeps data private and secure because voice requests never leave the device and are never stored. The voice UI can be integrated into appliances, vehicle infotainment systems, set-top boxes, home automation, industrial and enterprise application and mobile apps, said the company. It’s designed to run on an application processor with all speech processing done natively at the edge and can be set to customized wake-up words chosen by a device maker. The technology can also be configured to provide biometric-based security and user control features. Supported languages planned for 2020 release are U.S. and U.K. English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. In Las Vegas, Sensory will preview the technology for a microwave oven by appointment only.
Shipments of virtual assistants rose 25 percent year on year to 1.1 billion units this year, on course to exceed 2.5 billion shipments by 2023, reported Futuresource Wednesday. Virtual assistants are becoming a common feature across CE devices and in the automotive sector, said analyst Simon Forrest, saying shipments of voice-enabled products will overtake those without voice capability next year. By platform, Apple Siri holds 35 percent share globally, followed by Google Assistant (9 percent) and Amazon Alexa (4 percent), due to shipments across first-party products, said the research firm. Though virtual assistant vendors have been reluctant to cooperate on multi-assistant products, that’s expected to change, said Forrest, after establishment of the Voice Interoperability Initiative, a program created to ensure voice-enabled products offer customers choice and flexibility through multiple, interoperable voice services.
Smart speakers will be key to future IP-based voice services, said Juniper Research Wednesday. The number of voice over LTE (VoLTE) users will approach 5 billion by 2024, vs. 2 billion this year, said the researcher, forecasting more than 220 million smart speakers will be used to make calls to landlines or mobile phone numbers during the span. Smart speakers including Amazon Echo and Google Home will enable new engagement channels operators can offer to brands and enterprises, said Juniper, which estimates the number of smart speaker voice minutes to phone numbers will grow more than 1,000 percent over the next five years, totaling some 230 billion minutes of voice use globally by 2024. VoLTE networks will be increasingly used to direct mobile calls to smart speakers, said the firm, encouraging mobile operators to support the emerging services by using mobile phone numbers as unique identifiers to enable calls to be directed to the correct smart speaker user. Users, it said, will link incoming traffic to both smartphone and smart speakers simultaneously. The research identifies communications-platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) as key to the distribution of emerging voice services, saying nascent voice technologies, such as interactive voice response and voice bots, will be integral parts of successful CPaaS platforms by offering additional communication channels. It predicts operators’ revenue from voice services will drop from $380 billion this year to $210 billion in 2024, due to increased use of over-the-top apps such as WhatsApp and Viber. Operators that partner with CPaaS vendors could allow access to their mobile subscribers for voice and messaging services as a way to mitigate declining revenue, Juniper said.
Acoustic sensor company Vesper said its Zero Power Listening (ZPL) technology was certified by Amazon for extended battery and far-field voice interactions. The company’s piezoelectric micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) mics are powering the first hands-free, extended battery life Alexa-enabled headset with ZPL, it said Tuesday. The VR headset, from Amazon original device manufacturer Ludran, is a two-mic Bluetooth neckband headset with Alexa built-in that allows users to interact with Alexa skills for music playback and smart home control, Vesper said. ZPL eliminates the button in push-to-talk devices and is said to bring voice activation to many types of battery-powered devices. Based on Ambiq's Apollo3 Blue Wireless SoC, the headset incorporates Vesper’s MV1010 MEMS mic with ZPL technology, allowing systems to be in energy-saving deep-hibernation mode until awakened by a wake word, it said, solving a need for stable, reliable and long-lasting mic arrays that operate in environmentally harsh surroundings.
Google smart speaker sales slumped in Q3 due to its “aging product range and lack of a tent pole sales event,” reported Strategy Analytics Tuesday. Google Home shipment growth slowed to 16 percent year on year. SA pointed to a revamped product line and plans for widespread promotional activity in Q4 as a chance for Google to pick up steam. Amazon shipped 10.5 million Echo-branded smart speakers in the quarter. “A well rounded product range," deep discounting and a trade-in program that "incentivizes users to stay in the Amazon ecosystem" helped Amazon climb back to 30 percent share from 22 percent in Q2, said analyst David Watkins. The global smart speaker category grew 55 percent to 34.9 million. Chinese vendors Baidu, Alibaba and Xiaomi saw above average growth, with “intense competition” from Alibaba and Xiaomi, said SA. China had 36 percent of global shipments.