The Year Ahead: 2020
This is my annual post where I look ahead to the next year. I’ll make some predictions, but I’ll warn you ahead of time…I don’t always get things right. 
Taking a look at last year’s post,
I did pretty well…maybe not as well as the year before, but still, I’m satisfied.
I missed on my first prediction:
Alexa gets the ability to send books to your devices
Miss. As far as I can tell (Amazon doesn’t always promote things), this didn’t happen the way I suggested. I wanted a way to manage my content: to send books I’d already bought to my devices. I thought that might come through a Goodreads skill (that’s what apps for Alexa are called), but there isn’t one. I think this coming year, 2020, may be more about software and services than hardware (not that there won’t be new hardware), so maybe that’s still coming.
UPDATE: Thanks to reader Shari Brownlee! This gets changed to a Hit. As I mentioned, Amazon doesn’t always promote things much, but on the Manage My Content and Devices page, Shari pointed out this: “Using Alexa, you can now send ebooks, audiobooks, personal documents, etc., to your Kindle or remove them permanently from your library. Try saying “Alexa, manage my content”.” I tested it, and it didn’t work well for me…I used my typical test title, Alice in Wonderland…but I have multiple versions of that, and it asked me to identify which one I wanted to send. I tried to get it to give me options, but even though I was talking to an Echo Show (where I thought it could show me titles on the screen), I couldn’t get it to do that. Still it exists, so it counts.
Amazon opens more brick-and-mortars, including an Amazon Go cashierless store for the public near the HQs
Hit. I mentioned the 4-Star stores (My trip to an Amazon 4-Star Store), AmazonBooks (The new Amazon Books opened in Walnut Creek California today…and I was there!), and Amazon Experience Centers. I specifically said, “If there is a Go store open to the public near an HQ, I’ll count this as a hit next year.” There are now multiple Amazon Go stores open to the public in at least four cities…including Seattle, one of the HQs. The other three cities are Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.
While not calling it HQ3, Amazon announces more localized complexes
Hit. They opened multiple locations in New York (where the HQ2 ran into opposition), Salt Lake City, and more. These got quite a bit of publicity, so it wasn’t just that they opened a regular fulfillment center.
Two out of three for the predictions…not too bad. 😉 UPDATE: I actually hit three out of three, as reader Shari Brownlee pointed out to me! That’s better than “not too bad”. 😉
Now, let’s quickly run through my “speculations” from last year:
- Alexa speaks more languages: hit. She speaks German, several dialects of English, several dialects of Spanish, French (both Canadian and from France), Italian, and more
- Amazon does something with Max Headroom: Miss. This was really random, and just didn’t happen 🙂
- The Department of Justice investigates Amazon for trade practices: Hit.
- Amazon invests in a book preservation program: Miss. Well, as far as I know: I didn’t see any announcements on this
- Alexa wearables: hit. This was a super duper hit, with a ring, earbuds, glasses frames, and more
- Amazon introduces or partners with a Microsoft Teams/Slack type business collaborative suite: miss. I didn’t see that happen
- Over 10,000 Alexa-enabled devices: hit. I’ve seen the number 28,000, and there may be more now
- Amazon starts a podcasting platform. Miss. There are more podcast options for Alexa, but they didn’t set up a new publishing platform
- Amazon does an easy video publishing platform. Miss. I was picturing something like Alexa taking a video and then you could verbally share it with people
- Amazon-branded robot. Miss. Interestingly, my new Vector robot (at AmazonSmile: benefit a non-profit of your choice by shopping*), a gift from our adult child & significant other, has Alexa built into it. It can’t do quite a few Alexa things (it won’t read me my Kindle books or play music), but it does quite a bit…it can even speak in Samuel L. Jackson’s voice
- I called one a bonus, that we’d get stories on Amazon’s healthcare initiative, and we did, but I figured that was so obvious I wouldn’t take credit
Oh, and I think it was back in 2015 that I predicted Amazon would do a news app…that happened this year. 🙂 I’m sometimes ahead of the curve with them…
Now, the predictions for this year:
Let me start out by saying that this may feel like a “building” year. They introduced so many out there hardware things this year, that I think that will be quieter (but there could be at least one new market-creating item). Also, in the USA, it’s a Presidential election year. While Amazon certainly thinks long term, they (and many other companies), may want to sit back a bit to see what happens. The outcome of this election may make a difference to the business climate, including regulation. I am very specifically not saying one or the other would be better (I stay away from politics in this blog), but simply point out that the two approaches are likely to be different, which may make companies cautious to commit until that outcome is known.
Alexa makes big strides in sounding natural
That’s stated pretty generally, but I’ll set some sort of parameter. This is complex, and probably needs to significantly include artificial empathy. Amazon may announce an artificial empathy program. The celebrity voices (there will be more than just Samuel L. Jackson…I’ve speculated that one might be Jackson’s Marvel castmate, Scarlett Johannson) will help with that. It is possible that there will be a story saying that Alexa has passed the Turing Test (people not being able to identify whether it is Alexa or a human being talking to them after speaking to each for 5 minutes…that’s a simplified version of it. If the Turing Test gets mentioned as Alexa having passed it, I’ll count it). I’ll count this as success if: Amazon announces progress and a major program around natural sounding speech and/or Alexa passing the Turing Test is in a news story and/or some poll or study shows that people think Alexa sounds natural.
An Amazon published books wins a major non-genre prize
The Booker, the Nobel Prize, National Book Award…something like that. They’ve already won some genre-specific prizes. This feels risky, but with more established authors striking deals with Amazon, it seems possible.
Something specific is announced as a milestone for Amazon using robots
This might be a fulfillment center completely staffed by robots (although they could be managed by humans…robots would do the labor, which is the origin of the word). It could be in the area of AI writing or curating books for Amazon (that’s still a robot: tech doing the work humans have done). There could be an Alexa channel of some kind, where the AI picks the content. To get credit for this, I’d want either Amazon to announce it or for it to be a “major” news story: let’s say one reported by a mainstream news source.
I have my doubts about my success on those!
Now, let’s do my speculation. These are fun for me, and they are much more guesses.
- Amazon does something with Books-A-Million, possibly even buying it
- Lizzo does something with Amazon, maybe in conjunction with Prime Day
- Amazon does still do a speech-to-text (dictation) program of some kind (that would be despite some specific objection to it)
- Something specific happens with Amazon fighting climate change: while they have been doing some ecological things all along, this is seen as a big move, such as switching to electric delivery vans
- Prime Video starts focusing more on obscure, cult, sort of less prestige content. That’s in part to counter Disney+: more R-rated content becomes available, more low-budget genre fare (often decades old). Also countering that, Amazon announces an anthology series based on classic (specifically, public domain) short stories. Very famous creators are involved
- Elon Musk & Amazon (or Jeff Bezos) do something together…maybe something as simple as Alexa in the Cybertruck, but we see it in the news
- Amazon does something specific for video production for creators. Last year, I suggest a platform for publication, but this could just be automated video editing
- I’m feeling something big happening in South America for Amazon…like an HQ
- I’d still like to see Amazon do something specific with preserving and/or making available public domain books
- Amazon uses AI to analyze books in some new way. Maybe it’s a way to recover information, like querying books. Maybe it produces short summaries of books. This is challenged by publishers
Okay, that’s three predictions and ten speculations…lucky 13! Virtual fingers crossed!
Any predictions from you? Feel free to let me and my readers know by commenting on this post.
Some of my readers are already in 2020 at the time of publication: Happy New Year!
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