Ever since the runaway success of the Amazon Echo, competitors have been coming up with their own versions to tap the new smart speaker market. But Amazon has already had a head start. A new powerful competitor is set to challenge the biggies. Wall Street Journal is convinced that Samsung is joining the race.
Samsung’s new product dubbed “Vega” will be powered by AI assistant Bixby which Samsung considers to be a game changer. Nonetheless, Bixby has a long road ahead to maturity, as the software has yet to support US English fully. In fact, Samsung has just released an open beta to test how well it works. Samsung launched Bixby with the Galaxy S8 but had to pull back voice activation support because of the language issue.
On the other hand, the Alexa-powered Echo has 70% market share in the US and its biggest competitor Google Home has 24%. Even Apple has sensed the opportunity and launched its own HomePod smart speakers at WWDC 2017.
Meanwhile, forecasts predict that 36 million Americans will use one of these speakers each month this year. As the products are new, there is much potential & demand can only rise from here. This is a positive note for Samsung which is a very late entrant in this market. But Samsung must up its game & it can’t afford hiccups like these if it wants a good share of the pie before it’s too late.
