The troops are amassing on the voice front
Amazon is expanding their Alexa team in leaps. Apple lost and what is Google doing?
Amazon has 1128 job openings across 15 Alexa teams. Locations range from the US, to China, UK, Romania, Germany, Japan and other places.
Roles are mostly technical (no surprise) yet not too many voice UX designers. Like mobile apps, that will be done by the global contingent of developers.
Beginning of this year at Smartly.ai’s Smart Voice Summit I spoke withs several senior Google and Alexa execs who are active in voice. They were happy to be out of their respective “buildings”. It was obvious that they organizations were pushing them hard. They were tired.
Logical. The market opportunity is huge. The device adoption growth of over 50 million in three years is unprecedented.
A break down of the number of roles per team:
78 Communications
21 Customer Experience
90 Data Services
161 Engine
27 Entertainment
57 Experience & Devices
28 Household Organization
56 Information
12 International Expansion
271 Machine Learning
44 Mobile
40 Shopping
59 Skills Teams
54 Smart Home
109 Voice Services
Across the board Amazon is shoring it’s teams up.
Apple got off track despite being a first mover with Siri. Rumors are the lack 1500 people just to get on par with Google and Amazon. Last week Apple dit snag the Googel Ai director, so things may change.
Google isn’t as transparent what they are recruiting in the field. Then again, their generic names like Google “Home” and “Assistant” don’t help the search.
This is only the beginning.
Soon the businesscases will emerge pushing the new voice medium in over drive.
Voice first will be a book title, a presentation title and a track at the popular tech events.
Voice UX designers will be as popular as app developers today. In Amsterdam the design schools are preparing already and making voice UX part of the curriculum.
Another job robots won’t take over.
For now…
Maarten Lens-FitzGerald
Plubic speaker, entrepreneur and consultant in the fields of future of work, teams and voice services www.lens-fitzgerald.com
Co-founder of Layar, Teamily and Associate Partner at Moore Amsterdam.
