The Artificial Intelligence Arms Race: Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant, Siri, Viv… and What's Next

As one of our mobility analysts at Blue Hill, I get (perhaps unduly) excited over any shiny new gadget, even though I've recently been disappointed by what seems like a lack of innovation in the mobile market (cue the "I miss the old Apple" rant). That's why I was excited, but skeptical, to cover Google's October 4th product announcement of its long anticipated "first" smartphone. But it's really not the hardware Google is focusing on with its most recent product launch, though it could certainly seem that way from its unveiling of the Pixel (the first Google branded smartphone), the Daydream View virtual reality (VR) headset, and the Google Home smart hub. No, it hasn't been about hardware for the past few years for mobile device manufacturers it certainly seems, with only small incremental changes being made to hardware (or, in the case of Apple's removal of the headphone jack, gigantic leaps and bounds of courage … but that's another story). Most of the focus of smartphone innovation instead has been coming from within: with the software, and most recently, artificial intelligence.