The Reasons That the iPhone's Biggest Threat Isn't Android, It's Amazon's Echo

Visual images and voice are becoming more popular forms of communication than text. The implication may be, as the following article asserts, that "the future may be hands-free and screens-free in the home, in the car and on the go. " JL

Davey Alba reports in Wired:

Sales of the iPhone go into decline by the end of 2016. Right as this is happening, sales of the Amazon Echo are starting to take off. Using voice as a way to command your tech is steadily gaining traction. By 2020, at least 50 percent of all searches will make use of images or speech. There’s a burgeoning opportunity to go not just hands-free but screen-free in the home, in the car, and on the go.

KPCB

On slide 133 of her much-anticipated annual Internet Trends report, venture capitalist Mary Meeker made a curious comparison. She put a graph of iPhone sales side-by-side with a sales estimate for the Echo, the newish wireless speaker and voice-activated personal assistant from Amazon.
That juxtaposition might seem strange, but Meeker was making a point. Sales of the iPhone have been slowing, and according to Meeker’s projections, they’ll go into decline by the end of 2016. Right as this is happening, sales of the Amazon Echo are starting to take off.
It’s a sign that using voice as a way to command your tech is steadily gaining traction. By 2020, according to Andrew Ng—chief scientist at Chinese Internet company Baidu, who Meeker cites in her report—at least 50 percent of all searches will make use of images or speech. Meeker also notes that Apple has its own contender in this contest. By June 2015, she said, Apple’s voice-activated personal assistant Siri received more than one billion requests a week. Meanwhile, she said as of last month, 20 percent of searches on Android smartphones were voice-based.
Meeker seems to be suggesting, however, that the traditional smartphone won’t necessarily rule all when it comes to seeking digital assitance. As the Echo’s popularity shows, there’s a burgeoning opportunity to go not just hands-free but screen-free in the home, in the car, and on the go. Just yesterday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said more than 1,000 people are working on the Echo and Alexa, the software that powers his company’s voice-activated assistant. If Meeker and Bezos are right, we’ll all be spending a lot more time talking to our computers soon enough.