Remember a time when services were either free or very cheap? Seems like those days are long behind us, and the price of progress means an ever-increasing number of subscription services.
This week, both Amazon and Google announced new hardware designed to work with their advanced AI services, Amazon Alexa Plus and Google Gemini for Home. Both companies promised a raft of changes, including more natural conversations with their AI assistants and even creating automations with your voice.
Some of the changes genuinely sound better, such as the ability to chain commands together, such as, “Turn on the lights, set the heating to 20° and turn the TV on.” Just being able to speak in a more natural way without having to remember the exact command structure should make integrations better.
However, there’s a catch: subscription services are on the way.
AI is expensive
AI is expensive to run. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said that users saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ have cost the company tens of millions of dollars. It’s all down to the way that large language models (LLMs) have to process the input and generate an appropriate output.
To make AI work, companies need to generate revenue in some way, and a direct subscription model seems to be the approach that most are taking. With Amazon Alexa Plus, the starting price is a hefty $19.99 a month, although Amazon Prime subscribers will get the service for free; how long this will last, or how long Amazon will wait to put up the price of Prime remains to be seen.
I can envision a future where there will be a price premium on top of regular Prime for Alexa. After all, Prime users get Amazon Prime Video for free, but the company has started whacking irritating adverts in the middle of everything unless you pay an extra £2.99 a month.
Microsoft also started charging a premium for its Microsoft 365 plans. Buy Office 365 Family (Office and OneDrive) with Co-pilot, and it’s £104.99 a year. Switch to the Classic version without Co-pilot, and it’s £79.99 a year. Microsoft does a good job of hiding the cheaper version of the product, and I had to hunt for it, as Co-pilot really isn’t worth the extra money.
Google increased its Workspace prices to cover the cost of having Gemini in there, too. So, I cancelled my Workspace accounts and moved to a cheaper email hosting service.
For Google Home users, everyone will get an upgrade to Google Gemini for Home, with the AI smart assistant replacing the old Google Assistant. If you want Gemini Live, the conversational chatbot that lets you have full conversations, then you need to get a Google Home Premium subscription (previously called Nest Aware).
That’s £8 a month, and includes more intelligent alerts and cloud storage for your Nest cameras. Or you can pay £16 a month to get descriptive notifications (the notification tells you what was detected, rather than something simple like ‘person detected’), and video search, similar to the feature in Ring Protect.
That’s all fine, but as the main features are about add-ons for Google’s own cameras; if you’re using different security cameras, the subscription price is a high price if you just want Gemini Live.
Is voice control really that important?
The current generation of smart speakers has indeed become a little annoying to use. Trying to recall the exact phrase and name of a device to perform a simple task, such as turning on the lounge lights, can be frustrating. The lack of ability to deal with complicated questions, with responses like “I don’t know that”, does somewhat take away the fun of using a smart speaker.
The question is, will more conversational AI really change things? That’s a hard one to answer. What I do know is that in many cases, voice just isn’t as convenient as an automation or a physical control.
If I walk into my living room, then it’s faster to hit the light switch and have my Hue lights turn on than it is to speak a command, regardless of how smart the AI is. With a Hue remote by the sofa, it’s faster to hit the dim button and stop at the right point than it is to use a voice command and guess which brightness percentage feels right.
Likewise, if I lock the door to my garden office, it’s easier and faster to have an automation that shuts down the heating, closes the blinds and turns the alarm on than it would be to issue a voice command to do the same things.
It’s not that improved AI won’t be better. Based on all the early signs, a smart assistant that understands better what it’s being asked will be a huge improvement and will increase the number of times I use voice. However, as my examples above show, there are still many instances when voice control isn’t as convenient as the alternatives, regardless of how smart the AI is behind it.
Trying to get people to pay extra for services that may only be used occasionally is a tough sell, particularly in a world where everyone has already faced huge price rises everywhere.
We’ve gone from a simple time to when you might get away with paying for a cheap Netflix subscription (remember the £5.99 a month days?) alongside Spotify and a cloud subscription for your camera, to one where there’s now a huge number of streaming video services competing for our money and attention, on top of increasing numbers of companies looking for subscription money.
Companies are all struggling to make it work: all of the streaming video services have put their prices up, or introduced cheaper ad-supported services that drop the streaming quality. Ultimately, people only have so much money, and it’s becoming more common for short-term subscriptions to be taken, such as paying for Apple TV for one month to binge through every episode of the new series of Slow Horses once they’re all available.
It’s into that world that advanced AI is coming to the smart home, and I think it could be a hard sell to get people to pay up each month, and even higher prices could be on the horizon.
