With everything going on this week with my family, I’m just going to have to cancel this week’s Livestream Q&A Chat. We’ll plan on doing it Monday next week. More details to come. Sorry all.
I’ve explained before how we’ve reached peak swipe (see my report from last summer called “Peak Swipe: Why Alexa is Apple’s greatest threat” pasted at the bottom of this article), where people won’t be looking down and swiping their phones to control the apps inside of them. Likewise, the remote control is dead. The Voice Revolution has killed it. The latest and probably the biggest dagger into the heart of the remote control is Amazon’s new Fire TV cube which, as CNBC, succinctly titles their article about it: Amazon’s new Fire TV Cube lets you ask Alexa to change the channel.
And as Amazon explains it on the page where I just placed my own pre-order for the Fire TV Cube, you can “control your TV, sound bar, cable or satellite box, receiver, and more with just your voice.”
But more importantly, with so many new Voice Revolution devices and applications in just your living room hitting all the time, we can all start to see the magnitude of the size of The Voice Revolution marketplace. That is, in the next handful of years, we’re going to see people engaging in The Voice Revolution hundreds of billions of times per day.
In The Voice Revolution book I wrote last year, I mentioned that:
“I keep coming back to voice-interactivity because nothing excites me like the opportunity I foresee over the next one to five years for those of us who bet on The Voice Revolution and its potential to change everything we do with content, work and each other over that same time frame. Billions upon billions of voice-interactive devices (not including smartphones and tablets) will be sold annually within ten years. That’ll mean an installed customer base of two billion people using voice-interactive devices (not including smartphones and tablets) and the “skills” that run on them by the year 2025 or so. Those two billion customers will be using these voice-interactive devices (not including smartphones and tablets) dozens of time each day. Doesn’t it just about make your mind go numb trying to fathom that kind of growth and potential marketplace?”
Now even though I’ve been the biggest Voice Revolution bull on the planet for several years now, do you notice how much I underestimated our daily interactions with voice-interactive devices? We’ll be using these voice-interactive devices “dozens of times per day”? Oops. It’s going to be more like hundreds of times per day.
I mean, just since I woke up this morning, I’ve:
- Asked Alexa to play Regina Spector while I got ready this morning.
- Held down the button on what will soon be my “old” Fire TV stick remote control to ask Alexa to change the channel on PlayStation Vue from ESPN to CNBC on my office’s projector.
- Asked Alexa to do some math for me for this very article. “Alexa, what is 2 billion times 200 times 365.” She just told me that the answer is 146 trillion.
- Asked Alexa to turn on my stereo that’s plugged into a smart outlet at my office.
- Asked Alexa to play T Rex’s Children of The Revolution, Urban Dance Squad’s “Deeper Shade of Soul,” on Spotify and then to “Play Classical Music.”
And I don’t even have my Fire TV Cube yet.
All that said, I take it back — the remote control isn’t going to die entirely. You’ll still want to be able to change the channel or the volume with a remote control when you’re watching TV with a chatty family or other times too.
But the broader point is that we are going to see billions of people talking to their tens (or hundreds) of voice-interactive devices, cars, TVs, dryers, washers, thermostats and all kinds of other applications for voice-interactivity in a 5G world hundreds of times a day — not dozens of times a day.
Think about all those numbers. In the next handful of years, we’re going to see people engaging in The Voice Revolution at least hundreds of billions of times per day and hundreds of trillions of times per year.
Best plays on The Voice Revolution? As I’ve said all along, the best way is to invest in the winning Voice Revolution platform: Amazon and its Alexa. You can also check out the report I wrote last summer that highlights the Top 12 Stocks for The Voice Revolution.
Before I go, I want to thank all of you for the kind words and prayers and comments about my daughter Amaris. She is feeling much better as it appears they’ve found the correct antibiotic and she might even be headed home tomorrow.
Finally, here’s the article I wrote about Peak Swipe and how Amazon’s Alexa is an existential threat to Apple’s own platform.
Peak Swipe: Why Alexa is Apple’s greatest threat (And how Amazon anti-trust will play out)