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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: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday July 01 2018, @04:41AM (1 child)
The audio on the mini is pretty tinny; the regular Google Home speaker is decent for music. I'd prefer a ceiling mount, to make it easier to see the lights indicating that it's processing your audio and to make it harder to block the microphone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @12:58PM
I would probably fall in the target market for one of these things. I do not really have an interest in it. If you give me one for free. I would probably plug it in out of curiosity for a few days. Then un-plug it and then dump it in my large pile of other useless electronics. It would become literal garbage in this household.