Spotify Smart Speaker Potentially In The Works

Richard Goodwin 21/02/2018 - 9:12am

Google. Apple. Amazon. And now Spotify? Music streaming giant said to be looking at building its own smart speaker

Smart speakers like Apple’s HomePod and Google’s Home and Home Max seem to be the new gold rush of the technology space. Packing in wireless audio capabilities alongside digital assistants like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, these smart speakers are fast becoming very common.

But could Spotify ACTUALLY get in on the action? According to a recent job post by the company, Spotify is looking at making physical products and it is recruiting expertise to realise this goal. The company wants to set up an “operational organisation for manufacturing, supply chain, sales & marketing”.

Spotify has said that it wants to build a category-defining product in the past and it now looks as if it is now in the early stages of doing this – and most seem to think it will be a smart speaker. But could it compete with Google Home, Apple HomePod, and Amazon’s Echo Plus?

I’d argue, yes, it could. Why? Simple: the devices aren’t all that sophisticated. The barriers to entry are pretty low, we’re not talking about making phones here, and the costs, for a company the size of Spotify, are totally manageable. You design the speaker, build the software, get it made in China, ship it out via your web portal.

Spotify has millions of users, so it has an ever-growing captive market that it can target the device towards. It’d only need a conversion rate of 5-10% to make the device a resounding success. All it needs to ensure is that it sounds good, unlike Google Home, and features a useful digital assistant, unlike the Sonos ONE, which poorly integrates Amazon’s Alexa.

No one brand has this space locked up just yet, but the companies with their own AI (or assistant) are more ideally placed to grow and dominate the playing field. For this reason, Spotify will have to tread very carefully when entering this space, as I am assuming it will be using either Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa.

There is Cortana, of course, as well… Either way, it’ll be interesting to see how this develops between now and 2020.

by rgoodwin via Featured Articles