How Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant Will Make Money Off You

Apple, Amazon, and Google say their virtual helpers—Siri, Alexa, and the less snappily named Google Assistant—can make our lives easier by acting on our commands to book cabs, order pizza, or check the weather. But like all the other free-to-use goodies that tech giants offer up, these new personal assistants must also earn their keep. The companies aren’t saying much about exactly how their automated personas can boost their bottom lines, but they have clear potential to open up new lines of revenue. Perhaps most important, they could significantly increase the data that companies have on our preferences and everyday lives.

“A deeper profile of the customer is possible,” says Sridhar Narayanan, an associate professor of marketing at Stanford. “Already Google and these others have a lot of information about us—this is one new source that is different.” Google's new virtual assistant will watch over chats inside the company's forthcoming Allo mobile messaging app and offer help with things like finding restaurants. The virtual assistant contest between the tech giants can be traced back to 2011, when Apple launched Siri, an app acquired as a startup the previous year. The app has been widely seen as less useful or revolutionary than Apple originally claimed it would be (see “Social Intelligence”). But speech-recognition and language-processing software have recently improved, and the companies have become more ambitious.