Google has a leg up in voice, which is probably the next shift in consumer behavior, and as a result, payments. The same is true for Amazon. Google’s Hands Free facial recognition experiment may not have caught on, but the popularity of its Home Assistant, as well as Amazon’s Alexa, is rising rapidly. Echo sales jumped 400 percent from last year, according to VoiceLabs, and both Google Home and Alexa grew their third-party developer bases more than 1500 percent.
Meanwhile, Apple is missing the voice-first boat, which is odd considering that Apple Pay, a fingerprint-enabled mobile payment service, took an early lead in the mobile payments race after Google Wallet’s flameout.
But fingerprint tech is different from voice. And even though Apple’s Siri debuted well ahead of Alexa and Google Home, in differs from them in the types of information users feel comfortable sharing with her and what they can share with Alexa or Google Home.
Siri as a digital assistant lags behind them. Customers feel the difference when they ask Siri particularly complex questions and she often directs them to web searches requiring they do further reading and research, instead of replying with a complete answer the way Alexa or Google would.
“Apple is missing part of the voice-first revolution because they see it as an upending to the existing operating system,” Roemmele said. “They don’t see it as a modality in and of itself and because of that they box themselves out of it.”
Credit goes to Digi