Is it time we started talking to our smartphones?
Apple says it is preparing an SDK to allow apps developers to access the Siri interface and that it will use the improved version of the digital assistant to launch a home device along the lines of Amazon Echo or Google Home, possibly at this June’s WWDC.
With this move, three of the most important technology companies will be competing in the voice interface arena, and the scenario is not just our devices, but our living rooms. But despite technological progress in recent years that makes voice interface with devices the logical way forward, adoption is still few and far between.
A few days ago, Norwegian Dag Kittlaus, who designed Siri and left Apple in October 2011, unveiled Viv, which he describes as a major development in the personal assistant, or “an intelligent interface for everything”, still very much in the “coming soon to a device near you” phase, and that joins a cohort of startups and other companies now working on voice interface.
The big question now is whether an interface still used by a minority of people and subject to all kinds of jokes and stories is going to become, assuming the big players are right, in one of the main drivers of computing in the years to come. And the answer, once again, seems to depend on progress with artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Using Siri or Google Now still feels a bit like a toy, despite the plethora of information available and the complexity of the algorithms involved. Sure, you can ask them things, you can save tapping your phone’s keyboard, you can play a song, find out what’s in your agenda, what the time is, but you soon run out of questions or commands. After a while, the whole thing can feel like a waste of time.
And yet, everything suggests that we are about to enter a future in which we talk to our devices.
It’s a similar story with dictation, which has been around for many years in the form of interfaces such as Dragon, which I was impressed by, but again, adoption has been limited, although of course they have proved popular with the blind.
It’s strange to watch somebody talking to a blank screen, although it has to be said that the blind are also helping reinvent the smartphone. That said, the rest of society seems to prefer the “old” ways of using devices, even young people, who don’t seem to have taken up voice interface.
So why are the big players so convinced that voice interface is the future? What is going to be the killer app that makes the breakthrough? Echo has been a success for Amazon, and many customers seem to have fallen in love with Alexa, but I still find it hard to believe voice interface will take off, unless somebody comes up with some sort of killer application that really makes sense. There are some similarities between the voice interface environment and earlier moments in technology that Apple was able to reinvent. Does Apple’s announcement mean it is about to reinvent something that in my opinion still offers significant challenges, or is the company simply trying to copy its rivals?
As somebody who has tried different voice interfaces and who is certainly more positive than most users, to see the big tech players lining up like this prompts skepticism more than anything else, which is unusual for me: I don’t doubt that we’ll get there, but just not yet. Am I alone in seeing the situation in this way, and are you all out there chatting away with your devices unbeknownst to me?
(En español, aquí)
