Ellen stars in Amazon Alexa spot for Super Bowl 2020
New commercial spots for the Super Bowl are already leaking online — including this year's Amazon Alexa bit featuring no less than Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi. The spot highlights the simplicity of the voice assistant, and while we know you can use Alexa to run your lights, locks and security — you can also use Amazon's chatty bot to do things that took far more effort in the past.
In one of the spots — a full 90 seconds long (does that count as a movie short?) — Ellen and Portia are musing, as they head out the door, about what people did before they had Alexa in their lives. We're taken on a historic comedy romp from frontier days through the 20th Century where turning down the temperature and sending messages were a wee more difficult than just asking a voice-driven bot.
An earlier teaser also dropped last week with the pair, and the all the spots are meant to encourage people to muse on — and, of course, share — the idea of #BeforeAlexa.
Echo Show 5 - Compact smart display with Alexa - Charcoal
However, Alexa is hardly the only voice assistant in the game that can tell you jokes, deliver the news and lower the thermostat. Google Assistant is doing a fine job controlling smart home devices as well. Siri can chat with iOS users, and Samsung is still pushing Bixby, with Microsoft holding on to its Cortana. In fact, nearly 34 percent of people in the U.S. have employed a voice assistant at least monthly, according to a 2019 eMarketer report — and that will jump to 36.6 percent by next year in 2021.
Google has a Super Bowl ad for its Google Assistant, but the remainder — as far as we know — have not bought spots for this year's Super Bowl, and certainly none of them will have Ellen as their spokesperson. Ellen teased the commercial on her daily show — and here it is for you to see now as well.
