Year five begins. CES verdict from every floor report: Alexa won, and Amazon barely even had a booth. Alexa in fridges, cars, lamps, showerheads, hundreds of third-party devices, all voice-piping to Amazon’s cloud. While Google and Apple were building assistants as features of their own hardware, Amazon quietly built one as a platform and let everyone else do the manufacturing. The Echo looked like a gimmick in 2014; it’s an ecosystem in 2017. The platform play is invisible until it’s inevitable.
The winter’s Premier League fixtures deserve their line: Tottenham beat Chelsea to end their thirteen-match winning streak, avenging the Battle of the Bridge draw that killed their title chase last spring. Dele Alli headed two identical goals against the best defense in the league. Rematches are the universe’s A/B tests.
Nintendo’s full Switch reveal is Thursday: price, date, launch games. My preorder finger is stretched and ready. The console-handheld hybrid is about to be either brilliant or doomed, still no middle setting available.
TIL: wake-word detection runs on-device (a tiny always-on model listens for “Alexa,” only then streams to cloud), which is a privacy architecture and a latency one. The edge/cloud split is the decade’s design pattern. Everything ends up a cache hierarchy.