My understanding is that the computational costs of speech-to-text are prohibitive for many consumer startups, leaving them with no choice but to integrate with Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, who subsidize S2T costs in exchange for near-complete control over the user relationship.
Unfortunately it looks like the economics of voice assistants will drastically favor Big Tech, and make it harder for new entrants to compete.
Do not know how much of speech processing a typical startup would do, so cannot really give an estimate.
