Voice assistant war between Amazon and Google rages on in CES 2018

• Competition heats up between Amazon and Google over digital assistant dominance
• Digital assistants are being pushed to a wide variety of devices

IN THE 2013 Spike Jones movie Her, the movie’s vision of the future is one where humans are constantly talking and interacting with the digital assistants on their devices.

Well, that future is coming sooner than we think because come 2018 there will be more devices embedded with digital assistants powered by artificial intelligence (AI) from either Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Assistant. The two companies are battling for supremacy at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Google, which has not traditionally had a big presence at CES, was out in a big way as it plastered Las Vegas with its ads in a bid to show that Google Assistant is indeed everywhere.

Breaking away from the confines of the typical Amazon Echo and Google Home smart speakers, Google is already partnering with device makers like Lenovo, JBL and LG to make “Smart Displays” that allow users to pull up information by asking questions about the weather and traffic before they start their day.

Meanwhile Amazon is spreading Alexa far and wide to all sorts of different products that you would not typically associate with digital assistants like bathroom mirrors, shower heads, mesh routers, headphones, TV, navigation devices and even Windows computers.

With Amazon dominating CES last year with Alexa, it seems that Google can no longer ignore Alexa’s growing influence even though Google Assistant is available on phones and tablets.

Regardless of who wins when the dust settles, whether you say “Hey Google” or “Alexa”, the key takeaway from the showing of digital assistant-driven devices at this year’s CES 2018 goes to show that we will soon be talking to our devices even more from here on.

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