CES 2018 Hangover: The Smart Home – Josh – Medium

Nearly every booth / product we saw had voice as a feature for control. This is a big difference compared to last year, when voice and voice assistants were still being touted as an innovative and differentiating feature. While voice control is still very much in the early adopter phase for practical mass-market adoption, it was near ubiquitous at CES. Speaking of voice assistants, the big battle at CES 2018 seemed to be between Google's Assistant and Amazon's Alexa, and both companies took different marketing approaches at the trade show. Google opted for the brute force in-your-face spend a ton of money approach. Everywhere you looked, from the billboards on the hotels on the Strip to even the Las Vegas Monorail, Google showed up there.