I think that the difference is that when you compete based on hardware or software, eventually, through accretion, a free alternative can grow up if there are sufficient people interested in the topic and prepared to work on it, and there's nothing inherent that means that what they create will be worse than what a large company would create.

Most of these new services are built on data, and large, preexisting companies have huge advantages for the datasets that they can call on to train their systems. It's going to be very hard to escape the data problem for open source software.

I'm also losing hope in some of this stuff, because everyone is obsessed with building products, when in fact the internet is more about protocols and standards for talking between hetrogenous systems. Chat is a depressing example of this.

The challenge is simple integration across many disparate components, which seems like a rich company's game.

The only chance for a open protocol is if it's so cool and immediately useful that people adopt it en masse, a la Snapchat/Whatsapp. Or the market gets regulated. But either of those face a chicken/egg situation because the current market is too small to bother.

Do you really believe that every one will have this in their home?

No, I think there are going to be some tech guys who refuse to buy it for "tin foil" reasons. Generally speaking, I think "normal" people will continue to adopt it as the value increases.

My own experience though has pretty transformative. My mother, father-in-law, even my wife approached the device with extreme caution. However as they watched me naturally interact with it, they all gradually warmed up to it.... and now it's a must have. The other day I walked into my kitchen, asked Alexa what the weather was outside, but she was unplugged. It was weird... kind of like calling your grandma only to realize she's not alive any more.

I'm only 25. Maybe I'm too old, but talking to a device/machine has always seemed very unnatural to me. I don't think I'll be buying one of these.

To me it's the fact that Amazon / Google is already making more than the cost of these things in the data they extract from every sound in every house they're in. They should be paying people to use them, not the other way around. I'd be interested in a free alternative even if it's just to say "what time is it" when I wake up and "weather" before I leave every morning and not have to press anything. The technology itself seems very easy to integrate into life. I'm just not trying to pay someone to eavesdrop on me just so they can be there to say it's raining outside.

They don't listen/transmit until you say the hotword right?

Who knows without doing a deep packet inspection of your network.

Doesn't both Siri and whatever-google-does have this very ability already? I would think that every household has at least one of those things even today.

Steve Jobs believed that everyone will have a computer in every home. So I say ... umm... yes.

Everyone already has one of two options in their pocket.