How to make a trillion dollars: Invest in The Voice Revolution
One day last week, I was sitting on the floor in the living room playing with both Amaris, our medically-fragile 2-year old and our 3.5-year old, Lyncoln, while my wife, Lori, was in the kitchen making feeds to give to Amaris. To make the feeds that we give to Amaris through a g-tube in her tummy, Lori needs to balance carbs, proteins, calories, and so on. She was using her iPhone to find out how many calories various new items she was putting into the feeds when she says to me, “I want an iPad that just stays here in the kitchen.”
“You want the new Amazon Echo Show,” I told her.
“What’s that?”
“Ask Alexa.”
So she turns to the old Amazon Echo we have in the kitchen and says, “Alexa, tell me about the new Amazon Echo Show.”
Amazon says something like, “Echo Show brings you everything you love about Alexa, and now she can show you things. Watch video flash briefings and YouTube, see music lyrics, security cameras, photos, weather forecasts, to-do and shopping lists, browse and listen to Audible audiobooks, and more. All hands-free—just ask. Would you like me to order you one?”
She looks at me and we communicate using our facial expressions and hands to agree that, yes, she would like Alexa to order us one.
Our new Amazon Echo Show arrived Friday. And we both love it. It’s far from perfect, and the third-party developer apps for the new screen-enabled Alexa device aren’t quite ready for primetime, but after two days, we’ve used it dozens of times to play videos, connect to our Samsung TV, to pull up recipes, to get information about calories in cooked brown rice (there are several varieties of brown rice, which Alexa listed for us along with the caloric value of a cup of each after its been cooked)…
All this leads me to the point of today’s report — voice-interaction (along with the artificial intelligence that enables voice-interaction to continually improve) is one of the most important new revolutions we’re about to live through. The Voice Revolution.
For more than a year now, you all have been reading my commentary about how Alexa has already become a de facto operating system/platform and how Alexa is taking us to a future where we don’t swipe our smartphones, but we talk to a variety of smart devices, some with screens, including your smartphone but also new screen formats, including 3-D projectors and holographic imagery. By focusing itself as an operating system/platform in its own right, Alexa is several factors better than the competing voice interactivity solutions from Apple, Google, Samsung, Nuance or others. But the competition will make them all get much better in coming years.
We are quickly headed into a future where we engage with our devices by voice and not by swiping screens to pull up apps. In fact, the concept of “app” is about to become muddied, as the idea that you’d ever download an app to your smartphone will become passe. For example, when you want to enable your Amazon Echo device to play SiriusXM, you don’t download the SiriusXM app to it, you simply go into your Alexa app on your smartphone and enable the Sirius XM Skill (not app, but “skill”) and then you simply say, “Alexa, play channel 18 on Sirius XM” and she puts on the Beatles Channel.
You won’t be swiping around your smartphone to access various apps, you’ll simply say outloud, “Alexa/Siri/Google/Cortana/Bixby, open The IAm Jim Cramer App” and voila, The IAm Jim Cramer app opens up on your smartphone screen — or just as likely, the app pops open on your smartdisplay, perhaps an Amazon Echo Show or a 3-D holographic screen from your watch or just your car’s dashboard.
Remember back ten years ago when the iPhone first hit and I kept explaining that there would be billions of smartphones sold which would be used trillions of times every day and that there would be trillions of dollars of value created for investors? I called it The App Revolution. The Voice Revolution is going to be even bigger, as billions of people will use their Voice to work, play, search, learn, navigate, create and so on….everything you do on your computer, on your smartphone, on your car, in your kitchen — everything you do will be impacted by The Voice Revolution.
So my team and I are feverishly working on finding every company that will benefit from the Voice Revolution (clearly Amazon, but also dozens of other VIR publicly-traded companies and many more that will be coming public in the next year or two) and every company that will be disrupted by it (think about any company that depends on people clicking on ads, retailers, etc). We’re putting together a book called “How to Invest in the Voice Revolution” that will contain all of our research and will include both stocks to buy and stocks to short. We should have it published and in your inbox by the end of this month.
We already own some of the best plays on The Voice Revolution in large part because we invested in the best names from some of the other Revolutions upon which The Voice Revolution is going to be built. The Voice Revolution will stand on the shoulders of the Artificial Intelligence Revolution which is built upon the App Revolution which is built Internet Revolution which is built upon the Computer Revolution and the Telecom Revolution which are built upon Electricity Revolution….
Stay tuned for many more trends, names, ideas, sectors and general analysis of The Voice Revolution, what could end up being as big and important a revolution as any before it.
