Microsoft & Amazon

Microsoft and Amazon steal an AI march on Google and Apple

Decision to link digital assistants shows companies are looking past the smartphone
Inside Business

In a world where artificial intelligence is baked into many types of equipment, handing off conversations between assistants will be key © FT montage / Bloomberg

by: Richard Waters

The PC world had one dominant operating system: Microsoft’s Windows. Smartphones have two: Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. But in the artificial intelligence future now dawning, there are likely to be several.

That is the conclusion Amazon and Microsoft have reached, judging from an alliance this week to link their voice-activated digital assistants. Personal computing has traditionally been characterised by a race for platform dominance. The computing world now looks to be devolving instead into parallel ecosystems, with the terms on which the separate islands of technology connect a key open question.

So far, the era of voice-controlled computing has been more talk than action. As many who have bought Amazon’s Echo smart speaker can attest, trying to interact with a disembodied intelligence using only the spoken word can be frustrating. But as computing moves into many more pieces of equipment — most of them without screens, keyboards or mice — the digital assistants will inevitably assume a central role.

Amazon’s Alexa, the intelligence that powers the Echo, is well on the way to establishing itself as an important application platform — one of the key functions of an operating system. Making it possible to launch voice apps (known as “skills”) with a spoken command promises to bring a whole new dimension to the app store model.

With computing finding its way into many more places, it is getting hard for any single platform company to dominate. That explains the alliance between Microsoft and Amazon, the Seattle area rivals whose fight for leadership in cloud computing has made the Pacific Northwest a key battleground for the future of technology. In this area, at least, they have more to gain from joining forces against mutual enemies Google and Apple.

Thus far, Microsoft’s Cortana has been pretty much limited to PCs running Windows 10, where it is built in, despite being made available as a smartphone app. Amazon’s Alexa, meanwhile, has thrived mainly on the Echo — a new category of hardware that rivals are racing to copy. Their decision to connect highlights a shared weakness: their failure to crack the smartphone market. If phone-based assistants become a key part of the new hardware interface, that would favour Google’s Assistant and Apple’s Siri.

For their part, Microsoft and Amazon are looking past the smartphone. In a world where AI is baked into many types of equipment, few people will buy all their devices from a single company. Handing off conversations between assistants will be key.

But the assistants are likely to be as tightly linked to particular online services as they are to devices, making them the interfaces for widely used applications such as Google’s search and Microsoft’s collaboration software.

For mere mortals, connecting these assistants — and the ecosystems they represent — might become frustrating. Instead of “Open the pod bay doors, Hal” — the famous line spoken to a computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey — it could be a case of: “Hal, could you ask Cortana to wake up Alexa and see if she can find a door-opening app?”

A more seamless integration of ecosystems is likely to follow, where the intelligences operate in the background, handing off tasks to each other and sharing data about their users as needed. If those automated interactions are based on rules controlled by the users, it could be a world in which the humans feel more in control — though the fact that much of the interaction will be beyond human perception increases the risk of the game being rigged by the most powerful tech companies.

How well they work together will depend a lot on what each company believes it has to gain from opening up its ecosystem to the others. By acting first, Microsoft and Amazon have at least given themselves more say over the ground rules that govern such alliances in the future.

Meanwhile, other companies pondering their own future in this world of interconnected, multi-purpose digital assistants may regard an emerging oligopoly among the big tech companies with some concern. The assistants are likely to be more app-like than previous operating systems. To be useful, they will need a deep understanding of their users, and they are likely to handle more simple tasks directly, rather than handing them off. When Cortana runs much of your life and makes decisions on your behalf, there will simply be less need to juggle all those apps.

That might benefit the new tech oligopoly. What it means for anyone else trying to sell digital services is less clear-cut.