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'OK Google, give everybody in America a free speaker'
Alphabet Inc. should give every household in America a free Google Home Mini smart speaker, a Morgan Stanley analyst suggested Thursday.
The speakers currently retail for $49 each, which would mean spending about $3.3 billion. Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak wrote Thursday that would be a "small price to pay" for Google-parent Alphabet. He estimated that the company could compensate for that cost about five times over through the operating profits it generates more generally from retail search over the next five years.
Nowak worries that Google is losing ground to Amazon.com Inc. when it comes to retail search queries, given that more purchases are being made through voice commands and Amazon is widely thought to have a lead on Google in terms of smart-speaker penetration. He projects that roughly 70% of households will have speakers by 2022, and that Amazon will have 1.3 times more speakers in homes than Google will at that point, absent any dramatic action.
Also at VentureBeat and CNBC.
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(Score: 5, Informative) by requerdanos on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:35PM (2 children)
So, if Alphagoogle gives us free smart speaker devices, we own them, right?
Rather than disassemble mine, I'd rather load Mycroft.ai [mycroft.ai] on it. Mycroft is my "smart(alec) assistant" of choice, free/libre software and protocols. It has fewer (and less well-developed) skills and a lower intelligence than the corporate AI devices like google assistant itself, or alexa, which I consider to be a pesky detail that stands a good chance of disappearing with time.
I currently run Mycroft on my main desktop PC (a ten-core Xeon monster) but am working on migrating it to a single-board ARM computer (A FriendlyArm NanoPC T3) in a custom-built device. If Google were to send me a pre-built device capable of running it, so much the better.
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:49PM (1 child)
Last I heard, was told....sometime back in the 80's, that if someone mails something addressed to you, you can keep it obligation free.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @08:27PM
Yes, that's true. That's just basic contract law. If somebody sends something to you without some sort of agreement about compensation, you're not required to give it back or compensate them for it.
In practice, you might want to be a nice person and return it to sender, but it's not a legal requirement.