I wrote a post a little while back on my early experience with Alexa and Amazon's smart home solution. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a hotbed for many of these major tech companies, including but on a lesser scale, Microsoft, but if I had to pick a winner I would lean towards Google.
While they are newer into the physical device space, the software / voice recognition solution is what will make the champion. Google has a huge leg up here as they've been developing the voice rec tech for quite some time with use on phones. In the long run, I think they take it, but Amazon definitely has some loyalty to help them keep a good stake for a quite a while.
As for me, I am looking to expand my smart home gadgets heading into 2018 with some smart lightbulbs / switches to start. Would love to see where some more of the non-security smart home ideas go as IoT builds.
Great topic!
Check out my alexa discussion here if you have any interest as I broke down my experience in a bit more detail:
https://steemit.com/technology/@jcpadams/my-alexa-experience
Great contribution to this discussion! I'll certainly be stopping by to read about your alexa-experience as this is a pretty new topic of research for me and I could use some pointers... IOT is going to expand exponentially, perhaps that has something to do with the parabolic rise in price of a crypto called IOTA (it operates on the tangle and was specifically designed to facilitate transfers between IOT devices)
I've been doing some reading it IOTA and see can see why Microsoft likes the tech as it takes a spin on blockchain. Not sure how viable it is a true currency but will be interesting to follow for sure.