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As 2018 draws to an end corks are popped and cocktail are mixed guess who people ask for advice most: Alexa!
According to Business Insider the number of questions asked to Alexa on cocktail recipes during these festivities has reached the hundreds of thousands in the US marking a turning point in using voice to communicate with the web.
It is not about voice-asking for cocktail recipes, it is about voice-interaction to access the web in general. As shown in the Business Insider graph there is a steady growth of voice interaction. Last year I bought a new television set and during the installation I was at loss because I did not know how to type in the various information the setting up procedure required. Then I discovered a tiny microphone icon on the remote and that was the key: all interaction was voice based. Since then I am talking with my television and although it still feels awkward to me my kids (no longer kids actually, they are in their twenties and thirties) consider this completely natural.
Voice seems to take the upper hand in interaction with machines, and although that seems strange to me, used to have a keyboard, it is probably the sensible way to go. Aren’t we talking with our fellow humans? Why not with machines?
Clearly this is made possible by the amazing progress in speech recognition that to a point is getting better than my speech recognition ability. My television set can understand with the same ease people talking in Italian, English, German and French (and very likely several more languages, those are the ones I tried).
Au pair with this growth in speech understanding capabilities we are seeing a growing set of objects that can be controlled by Alexa and the likes.
According to Business Insider, home smart appliances have reached 400 million in US and are set to triple over the next 5 years. All these smart appliances can be controlled by voice activated gateways like Alexa.
It looks like talking to our appliances will become the norm in the next decade and it may be a sure bet that by the following decade we will no longer use keyboards.
