Andreessen: Lacking a Smartphone Allowed Amazon to Lead in Voice AI
Marc Andreessen · a16z Podcast | Software Programs the World · Jan 2, 2019 · at 12:32
Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz) discusses why incumbent platform giants face strategic handicaps when transitioning to voice-driven AI interfaces.
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“And so it's sort of this ironic twist of fate that Amazon has all of a sudden taken the lead from Google and Apple Even though Amazon, you know, famously flopped with their phone, right? Which is sort of the obvious place where you would have a voice interface. It didn't matter because they came out with this new product, which is this, basically the speaker, the smart speaker called Echo. And the fact that all of a sudden Amazon didn't have a phone all of a sudden became an advantage because they could just do the clean actual breakthrough product without worrying about tying it into the existing strategy.”
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