Buggy Echo Auto shows Amazon aims to pitch Alexa against Google and Apple

Seattle — Somewhere between Spotify crashing and Alexa failing to locate his favorite sushi place, Rafael Rivera decided he was dealing with an unfinished product.

The software developer’s rectangular Echo Auto, perched on the dashboard of his 2005 Mini Cooper, picked up his voice seamlessly over blaring music or air conditioning. But repeated restarts and clunky mapping made the on-the-go hub for Amazon.com’s Alexa less useful.

“Am I part of a beta program?” he recalls thinking. “Is this thing done?”

Introduced almost a year ago and shipped to the first invited customers in January, the sometimes-buggy Echo Auto is the most visible element so far of Amazon’s ambition to take Alexa on the road.

Behind the scenes, the company is trying to persuade carmakers to bake the voice-activated digital assistant into their entertainment systems. Those efforts are gaining some traction — earlier in 2019 BMW and Audi began selling select models that integrate Alexa’s software by default. But Amazon is entering a market already contested by Google and Apple, not to mention carmakers leery of ceding control of the dashboard to Big Tech.

While colonising the car probably won’t generate much in the way of revenue at first, just being there would help Amazon position itself for a coming era of voice-based services.

“Amazon wants to get into the car in a big way,” says Mike Ramsey, a senior research director at Gartner who tracks the car industry. “They sense that there is a big opportunity.”

Amazon declined to make anyone available to discuss the program, but a spokesperson pointed to comments Ned Curic, vice-president of Alexa Automotive, made to the Automotive News in July: “The real North Star for us is to be embedded with all the cars,” Curic said. “We’re working very hard to get there because we believe that is the best experience.”

The company has said it wants to make Alexa — its hub for trivia, music and Amazon products — ubiquitous. The company built teams in recent years charged with making the software useful beyond the living room, seeking ties to home automation and security companies, building out voice and video-calling functionality and even exploring wearable devices and home robots.

The first tie between Alexa and a carmaker was, like many Amazon efforts, an experiment. In 2016, Hyundai Motor rolled out the first application linking Alexa to a big carmaker in a tool that let owners of some models start their vehicle or set the climate control from an Alexa device.

Amazon formalised its push a year later, hiring Curic, an executive with Toyota Motor’s North American subsidiary, to run the automotive efforts.

Curic’s team plucked staff from Lab126, the San Francisco Bay Area hardware division behind the Echo speaker, and Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing arm. Amazon also went shopping for recruits who knew their way around the industry, seeking veterans of German stalwarts such as Daimler, BMW and Volkswagen, companies that have been among the most aggressive in exploring voice software.

Hanging over the exercise to take Alexa on the road is Amazon’s failure to build a smartphone to rival Alphabet’s Google and Apple. About 62% of people who use their voice to control music or other applications in their car do so through a smartphone, a market dominated by Google and Apple, according to a survey by voice technology news site Voicebot and dashboard entertainment startup Drivetime. Another 32% opt for the software included in their car’s entertainment system while 6% use different technology, including the Echo Auto.

“Amazon’s Achilles heel is not having a play on the phone,” says John Foster, CE of Aiqudo, a startup working to tailor mobile applications for voice control.

“They’re going at it the best way they can. But … they suffer from this disadvantage that Google is really starting to make clear,” Foster says.

Google, the company behind Android, the world’s most popular operating system, has automakers on board, building ties that could be used to hook drivers into Google’s Assistant, Alexa’s biggest rival. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi and Volvo are all building entertainment systems on Android.

Going own route

“Google has a much bigger footprint in the auto industry than Amazon does,” says Ramsey, of Gartner. “They’re getting big wins. Amazon is just starting to scratch the surface.”

Other carmakers are going their own route.

Some, like Daimler’s Mercedes, have thrown their weight behind proprietary voice software. The Mercedes-Benz User Experience system, like many automaker-branded software, is powered by technology built by Nuance Communications, a software company in Massachusetts.

All these manufacturers want to preserve their own brand in the car, says Richard Mack, a Nuance marketing executive. “When you press that button on the steering wheel, Mercedes would much rather see their emblem come up than a Google or an Amazon or a Microsoft logo.”

Amazon has tried to assuage carmakers worried about Google or Apple’s potential automotive ambitions by suggesting Alexa could be one among several voice assistants embedded in a future entertainment system, according to two people who have heard the pitch, but aren’t authorised to publicly discuss it.

Amazon released tools in 2018 that let carmakers build Alexa into their cars. The company has also tried to leverage Alexa’s popularity in the home, saying to potential partners that customers would rather use voice software they’re already familiar with than learn a new program while behind the wheel.

As Curic’s team negotiated with carmakers, Lab126 engineers got to work on an end around, repurposing the Echo speaker’s microphone arrays and software, originally designed for homes, for noisy car environments. The device avoided dealing with in-car communications systems entirely by piggybacking off customers’ smartphone to connect to Alexa servers.

When it was released, analysts said the Echo Auto seemed to fill a gap in the market, offering a device that promised to bring modern voice control to older car models. It drew more than 1-million orders, Amazon said, though the device is still shipping in batches and only to invited customers.

Reviewers said the device lacked polish, appearing at times like a work-in-progress. A reviewer at tech news site the Verge said some of the auto-focused applications Amazon touts on its website “are laughably bad right now”.

It’s harder to get a read on how customers feel because Amazon, which helped popularise online product reviews, has disabled customer reviews for the Echo Auto.

Ryan Adzima, who bought one to replace the outdated voice control system that came standard in his Jeep, is a fan. The owner of five Echo smart speakers figured the device’s introductory price tag of $25 was a bargain compared with replacing his entertainment system or buying a voice-activated navigation system.

He liked the device, which heard his commands over road noise with the windows open and top down and easily handled tasks such as calls and music. Connectivity, dependent on sometimes spotty wireless service around his Las Vegas home, left something to be desired, forcing him to reach for his phone to skip songs by hand when Alexa’s servers couldn’t be reached.

Adzima isn’t in the market for a new car. But if Alexa is integrated in enough models by the time he is, he’ll consider it.

“If I was sitting on a lot, and one car had Alexa built in, the other didn’t, and the cost difference wasn’t that much?,” he says. “That would definitely make my decision.”

Bloomberg