Competition is heating up between two of the world’s largest tech firms in the battle to dominate CES 2018, held annually in Las Vegas.
Coverage of last year’s trade show detailed the rise of Amazon’s smart assistant, which was used to enhance everything from cars to refrigerators.
Now Google is hoping to fight back with its own Assistant set to take on its rival and the company’s largest presence at the Consumer Electronics Show in a decade.
Voice-commanded virtual assistants packed into speakers and other devices will be a ‘game-changing’ trend this year, CES researchers have said.
Competition is heating up between two of the world’s largest tech firms in the battle to dominate CES 2018, held annually in Las Vegas. Google is hoping to take on Amazon’s Alexa, with the firm’s largest presence at the Consumer Electronics Show in years
CES officially kicks off at 9am PT tomorrow (5pm GMT) at the Las Vegas Convention Centre, but members of the media began arriving yesterday for briefings and an early sneak peek.
They were welcomed by the sight of the words ‘Hey Google’ plastered over the Las Vegas Monorail, which has been wrapped in a giant ad promoting Assistant.
Giant video screens, billboards and an outdoor booth at CES, complete with a twisting blue slide, are just some of the other marketing measures being used by the Mountain View firm to keep the phrase on the minds of visitors to the conference.
In a written statement, Rishi Chandra, VP of product management at Google Home and Scott Huffman, VP of engineering at Google Assistant, said: ‘Both the Google Assistant and Google Home had a very big year in 2017, with new devices, new languages and new features.
‘The Assistant is now available on more than 400 million devices, including speakers like Google Home, Android phones and tablets, iPhones, headphones, TVs, watches and more.
‘We have even more things in store for the Assistant at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
‘If you’re at CES, stop by the Google Assistant Playground on Central Plaza-21 to check out some of our new integrations, devices, and the newest ways you can use your Assistant.’
Google doesn’t usually have a booth at CES and the company hasn’t made this kind of impact since its co-founder Larry Page delivered a keynote speech at CES more than a decade ago.
Google Home and Assistant have been trying to catch-up to Amazon’s Echo and Alexa for a number of years now.
Apple, whose rival Siri voice assistant and HomeKit platform are key challengers to Google Amazon, traditionally avoids CES, preferring to announce its new products at its own launch events.
Sales of smart speakers are expected to nearly double in the US, to $3.8 billion (£2,8 bn), from last year according to Lesley Rohrbaugh and Steve Koenig, researchers with the Consumer Technology Association, which organises CES event.
Giant video screens, billboards and an outdoor booth at CES, complete with a twisting blue slide, are just some of marketing measures being used by the Mountain View firm to keep the phrase ‘Hey Google’ on the minds of visitors to the conference
Visitors to CES were welcomed by the sight of the words ‘Hey Google’ plastered over the Las Vegas Monorail, which has been wrapped in a giant ad promoting Assistant.
‘That market is not just heating up, it is a wildfire,’ Mr Koenig said while discussing industry trends expected to play out at CES and globally in the coming year.
‘Compatibility with digital assistants has become table stakes (in the consumer electronics industry).’
Being able to order items, select music, get information, and more by speaking to digital assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft’s Cortana has been such a hit that pressure will be on for more ways to interact with machines using voice, the researchers predicted.
The CES show-floor is expected to be rife with appliances, televisions, vehicles, speakers, robots, and more augmented with virtual assistant software such as Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant and Samsung’s Bixby.
Coverage of last year’s trade show detailed the rise of Amazon’s smart assistant, which was used to enhance everything from cars to refrigerators. Google is hoping to fight back with its own Assistant
The CES show-floor is expected to be rife with voice assistant enabled appliances. A woman plays with Buddy the companion robot by Blue Frog Robotics during the CES Unveiled preview event in Las Vegas yesterday
‘We will truly be able to converse with our AI devices,’ Ms Rohrbaugh said while envisioning where smart speaker technology was heading.
‘AI is going to know you and you will be able to trust the device.’
Behind the scenes, telecommunications service providers around the world will continue to roll-out fifth-generation, or 5G, networks capable of moving seemingly limitless amounts of data blazingly fast, according to the researchers.
Such 5G networks will be key to enabling machines such as self-driving cars to process sensor data quickly enough to make real time decisions, they said.
‘Clearly, we don’t want self-driving vehicles to hesitate for even a millisecond, so we are going to need 5G,’ Mr Koenig added.
Those higher speeds will also be necessary to ‘make virtual reality really wireless,’ handle data used to manage ‘smart cities,’ power augmented reality, and even to channel the flood of high-definition video streamed online.
‘5G and AI are heralds for the coming data age,’ Mr Koenig said.
Spending on consumer electronics devices and streaming services in the US alone was expected to climb slightly more than 3 percent this year to $351 billion, with the number of ‘connected’ devices in the country rising to 715 million from 671 million last year.