Which voice assistant will get the warmest welcome this year?

Everyone knows that there is, each holiday season, a gift that says, “I know nothing about you, but I love you, I mean, you get it.” For a very long time, this present was an iTunes gift card; Apple is the richest company in the world, and I am pretty sure this is exclusively thanks to the fortune it amassed from iTunes gift cards purchased for nephews and hairdressers in the first decade of the millennium. Prior to iTunes gift cards, the gift was maybe a sweater.

Now, I’m sorry to say, the comparable gift is a smart speaker. We keep purchasing them for each other, buying into the fantasy that Siri or Alexa or Google can make someone’s life easier by scheduling their appointments and managing their time and telling them how to put on makeup or make a butternut squash lasagna. Though, at the moment, reports say that people mostly just use them to listen to music, check the weather, and ask “fun questions.”

As nondescript gifts, smart speakers make a lot of sense: Both Amazon and Google have options that are around $50, there is at least some novelty factor that pokes at adults’ memories of receiving toys, and they are far less rude to give than a Fitbit. Plus, for Amazon and Google in particular, with 64.5 percent and 19.6 percent shares in the category, respectively, the point isn’t really to make money off selling hardware. The point is to beat the others at integrating their services into the lives of the population.

In other words: You’re not gifting an Amazon Echo; you’re gifting a relationship with Alexa. Amazon can later sell that relationship to brands that hope Alexa users will order their products with their voice. You’re not gifting a Google Home; you’re gifting a closer entwining with Google Search and all the strange personalized add-ons to Calendar and Maps.

This expansion of the voice assistant ecosystem is crucial to almost every major tech company, far more so than getting sticker price for devices that look like high-end air fresheners, and if you don’t believe me, please peruse the ridiculously marked-down Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals they are all offering this year.

Amazon

According to predictions from the Consumer Technology Association, shoppers are set to spend $96.1 billion on tech presents this year, up 3.4 percent from 2017. In the US, 66 percent of adults will buy some sort of gadget as a gift, and the CTA expects that 22 million of these gifts will be smart speakers. Overall, 12 percent of shoppers plan to buy some kind of voice assistant-enabled smart speaker, and 6 percent plan to buy a speaker that also has a screen — like Amazon’s recently updated Echo Show or Google’s just-released Home Hub.