Jump into Another Battle Field
Samsung Electronics has announced to lead the smart speaker revolution, challenging Amazon, the first mover of the artificial intelligence (AI) speaker market, and Google, which has established the Android Empire.
During a press conference for the Galaxy Note 8 Unpacked event held in New York, Patrick Chomet, vice president and head of the product strategy team at mobile division at Samsung Electronics, said, “Samsung can lead the large-scale revolution in any devices. As time goes by, Samsung’s AI speakers will have better competitiveness.”
He said, “Amazon’s Alexa achieved a success but the current AI speaker market is so small with tens of millions of units. There will be billions of AI speakers in the market within three to five years.” Market researcher Gartner also said, “One in four customers will use more than two AI speakers in 2020. The market will grow by six times from US$360 million (403.56 billion won) in 2015 to US$2.1 billion (2.35 trillion won) in 2020.”
Samsung Electronics believes that it will be able to get the lead in the AI speaker market at one burst based on its advantages in home appliances and smartphones. Koh Dong-Jin, president of Samsung's mobile business division, also said, “Samsung Electronics is the only total electronics producer around the world. We have no choice but to use the strength.”
Google is seeking to create its own AI “Google Assistant” ecosystem by introducing Google Home in November last year. The company is planning to use big data secured through Google Assistant to advance the AI technology and dominate the market of natural language processing searches which provide accurate search results even just with the sentences used in everyday conversations. Google Assistant is built in Android phones released in the U.K. and the U.S. Since smartphones equipped with Android operating system (OS) have a 73 percent market share, Google has an advantage to secure data.
Amazon, the first mover in the market, has been launching various AI speakers, widening the gap with late starters further. After releasing “Echo” in 2014, the company rolled out small “Echo Dot” speaker and “Echo Tap” featured with a display panel. In the U.S. customers associates AI speakers with Amazon to such an extent as to call Google Home as “Google Echo.” In addition, Amazon plans to build its own AI ecosystem based on its user experiences (UX) beyond shopping.