The stock of Sony Corp (ADR) (NYSE:SNE) closed at $39.63 gaining 1.10% in yesterday’s trading session. This provider has unveiled its own smart speaker which will be running on Google’s AI. This happened shortly after the provider received the news that Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) had resolved to avail its assistant on various third party devices.
The new announcement was made at IFA and Sony believes that its LF-S50G will succeed at disrupting other smart speakers from tough rivals like Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL), Google and Amazon.com, Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN)
Taking a closer look at specs alone sparks about the thought that Sony might be focusing more on additional interactive features and sound quality. Amazon still maintains its top position in consideration of companies with the best sound quality on the current crop of smart speakers whereas Google comes second.
The move by Google to open up Assistant to third parties will help the interested companies’ progress and all of them have showed their appreciation. However, it has pulled along with some predictable effect of flooding the market with a wide array of the smart speaker devices. In fact, the last 24 hours witnessed the announcement of four. Google has revealed that there will be more being unveiled next week. It is more likely that quite a large number will be seen in the lead up to Christmas.
These new third party smart speakers that are powered by Assistant evoke a number of questions for anyone focusing on them. It interests one a huge deal to learn exactly who has access to the voice-command data.
The other thing that might interest one is to strike a proper understanding regarding whether or not Google will be sharing its usage data with the manufacturers.
In Android’s case, the third party products usually bear their own UI layer on top of Assistant, which then usually customizes the experience to a particular brand. After that it proceeds with its own data collection. It would also be reasonable to imagine that Google would follow a similar trajectory.
Google’s spokesperson opined, “In either case, there’s an obvious monetary incentive to build these speakers because of the data they can vacuum up.”