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Google Home Vs. Amazon Echo: Can Alexa Survive Google’s Home Assistant?

By Nick Younker
Published on: 11:22 PST, Oct 2, 2016

Google Home is the next best thing to come along since Amazon’s Echo and the Alexa home assistant. But when Google unveils it’s Home virtual assistant later this month, does it have what it takes to surpass the enormous popularity of the Amazon Echo and carve a piece out of its market share?

Some people are saying yes, according to an article on the New York Times. Google Home is expected to fit right in with Google’s already dominating presence in the search engine market by providing its customers with search answers, which is what it already does online on every search page.

But there are a few areas that Google lags with the emerging market and its dominating presence with American consumers. First of all, Amazon has the online market cornered in several areas. It is the top of the food chain with e-books and it’s closing ranks with digital music, digital movies, video buffet streaming, consumer products, and even their shipping options are hard to beat.

So what would it take for Google Home to take a piece of the virtual assistant market? Well, for starters, their streaming business is still quite weak and does not even come close to their main competitors like Netflix, Vudu, Amazon, and Flixster. Google has been mostly an a la carte business in recent years, but it still owns the biggest video streaming service in the country, YouTube. The only problem is, YouTube is mostly free for its users and it is harder to monetize the site without pay-per-view subscriptions, etc.

Unlike the Amazon Echo, Google Home has simplified the virtual assistant by calling it, “the Assistant.” What has been obvious since the beginning is that Google has focused its main market by simply keeping everything online and not investing too heavily in gadgets. But all that has been changing lately while the smartphones and tablets have been slowly carving out a piece of that market share.

Some industry professionals were even shocked to see that Amazon was the first to bring a virtual home assistant to the marketplace, given that Google was so uniquely positioned for it in the beginning. Most thought that if anyone would have beat Google to the finish line, it would have been Apple.

But the Amazon Echo has flourished very well in the market and it is also able to monetize the device in so many ways that it has been able to turn out massive profits for the Seattle-based company. The Amazon Echo allows consumers to make grocery lists, set reminders, look up information, and play music.

But there is also something else that it does that directly allows Amazon to compete more fiercely in other markets. For its consumers that like to read, listen to music, and watch movies, the Amazon Echo allows them to make purchases from the device and Alexa can even get things shipped to your door, all from the comfort of your living room couch without the use of hand activated devices.

Google, on the other hand, has a unique way to get their foot in the door, as long as they can sell their Home device to start with. Google has been uniquely positioned as a company with superior technology that allows consumers to use their natural language processing software.

This is something that Google can really capitalize on with the Home device. The technology is able to better understand and give more precise and detailed responses to its consumers without the breakdown in communications that people might get from Alexa on the Amazon Echo, or even Siri on the Apple TV.

In the end, if Google plays its cards right and gives it’s consumers viable options to use, it can reach an equal or greater amount of the market share that Amazon currently enjoys.

[Featured Image by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]

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