By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
What is evident from this year's International CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is that smart assistants are emerging to be the biggest story from the show. Not only has Amazon's Alexa assistant transcended speakers, thermostats and is now comng to PCs and even cars.
Google and its Google Assistant is omniscient in Las Vegas this year. Not only is Google Assistant coming to various third-party headphones it's ramping up the range of functionality with one million actions, which are like Alexa's Skills or, to put it simply, services and apps that they can link to or processes that you can enable.
Google Assistant is also piggybacking on Android Auto installations ( in more than 400 car models) to bring its services to hands free users in cars. Google Assistant is also invading the TV space with the help of LG, always a willing partner for anything Google wants to develop. While a lot of announcements at CES are usually 1) months away from shipping and 2) not pertinent to global markets outside the US; the news on assistants is quite relevant to Canadians. Here's why.
Both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are now available in Canada through a range of smart speakers. More importantly, the back-end or server services that use the cloud to power these technologies are already tuned for the Canadian market (or are learning thanks to machine learning).
The new PCs that have Alexa built-in, the Google Assistant powered car infotainment systems will likely work in Canada once they are available. What is also interesting and evident is the non-participation of Apple and its Siri assistant as well as the fading into the background of Microsoft's Cortana assistant. It is starting to look like a very serious two-way race between Amazon and Google, with Google having the upper hand in international presence (Alexa has been slow to roll out globally).