Amazon Wants To Put Alexa On Phones But What Can It Do Better Than Google Assistant And Apple Siri?

The battle of the smartphone voice assistants has begun. While Google Assistant, Apple Siri, and Samsung Bixby are squaring against each other by offering different features, Amazon Alexa is on a different track altogether.

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Unlike the other voice assistants, Alexa’s first home was the innards of a smart speaker, instead of a smartphone. It was announced in 2014, but finally made its appearance in 2015 in Amazon Echo. Unlike Apple Siri which made its journey from a smartphone to a smart speaker, Amazon’s Alexa did quite the opposite. Until the end of the last year, it was only present in Amazon smart speakers. It has slowly traversed to smartphones and is now present in the Huawei Mate 9 and the HTC U11.

Amazon Alexa has a vast library of skills. You can ask it for guidance by just saying “Alexa, help.” You can even control music playback by just asking it to mute, stop playing music and even change the volume. You can also set an alarm and use it for intercom by pairing it with other Amazon devices. Just like Google Home, Alexa-enabled devices are also designed to work with smart home functionality. It can even connect and disconnect incoming calls, set reminders, make a to-do list and perform many other tasks. But, so can Google Home, Apple HomePod and a bunch of other smart speakers.

Alexa, just like other voice assistants, depends on the company supporting it. On Amazon’s smart speakers such as the Echo, the thing Alexa can do much better than other speakers like Google Assistant is — shopping. It can connect easily to Amazon’s retail website and let your shop for products, by just using a voice-input. It can open the Amazon app and help sort purchases by reading the description and asking if you want to purchase a certain product. It can also provide you with shopping alternatives.

However, as compared to voice assistants such as Google Assistant and Apple Siri, Alexa’s performance is far from being perfect. It cannot pull out text-based results like Assistant and Siri. More importantly, it cannot really utilize the strengths of a smartphone, unlike other voice assistants. It cannot delve into the settings of the phone and allow the user to change them. It doesn’t even have shopping-related features like Amazon Echo. With Alexa, you cannot access services such as Spotify or Pandora, like you can do on the Echo.

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In fact, users need to download two apps — Amazon Alexa and HTC Alexa to make the voice assistant work on Alexa-enabled phones such as HTC U11 and Huawei Mate 9.

So, Alexa on phones is currently not up to the mark and is nowhere close to Google Assistant and Apple Siri. You cannot depend on it as your sole voice assistant. Amazon still needs to work with developers if it ever wants Alexa to be considered as a competitor to Assistant and Siri.