Voice Assistants Are Wasted on Phones

Smartphones and smart speakers are limited when it comes to unlocking the full potential of voice interfaces. The future of digital assistants is in augmented and virtual reality.

By Ben Dickson

Apple’s voice assistant Siri has spurred numerous companies to develop rival digital assistants since her 2011 debut, the most popular of which — Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant — have long since leapfrogged Siri in quality.

And yet, voice assistants are used for just a fraction of the tasks we accomplish with our computing devices due to the limitations of the platforms in which they currently live.

Smartphones and PCs Are Not Designed for Voice

Surveys will tell you that an increasing number of people are using voice assistants on their smartphones. But their usage accounts for a small percentage of the time spent on their phones.

For instance, an April survey by Verto Analytics found that 52 percent of smartphone owners use voice assistants, but their usage was limited to 0.33 times per day, which is negligible when compared with the hundreds of interactions users have with their smartphones every day.

Blame smartphone design. User interfaces are built to keep you staring at and scrolling through your phone. For any device with a screen, voice will always be a secondary input.

Voice assistants are best suited for environments where you need a hands-free experience. You could ask Siri to read your emails while you’re getting ready for work, but you’re better off sitting down and reading them off your phone’s screen. Because our brains are not optimized to focus on two tasks at the same time, you’ll become distracted when you try to listen to Siri reading your emails while doing something else.

Consequently, voice assistants are limited to simple tasks such as opening apps, making calls, or simple queries such as asking for the weather — all tasks that most users prefer to perform while interacting with their phone’s touch screen.

Desktops and laptops are even less intuitive experiences for voice assistants. Siri has been available on macOS since 2016, and Microsoft has made Cortana an integral part of Windows 10. I own a Mac and a PC, and I love to tinker with new tech, but I’ve never even set up the digital assistants on either of them. When’s the last time you needed to use your PC in a hands-free situation? For the most part, we’re staring at the screen and using a mouse and keyboard, which makes digital assistants an optional, nice-to-have feature and nothing more.

Speakers Won’t Unlock Voice’s Full Potential

Smart speakers are obviously a more efficient use of voice assistants; Verto found that smart speaker owners use voice assistants an average of 2.79 times per day, which is considerably more than smartphones, but still not much.

In this case, the problem is the smart speakers themselves, because there is very little you can do with a device that has no display. Despite the tens of thousands of skills you can install on smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home, most users employ them for a limited number of tasks, including playing music, setting timers, and turning the lights on and off.

As soon as you want to perform a complex task involving multiple steps, the limits of smart speakers become apparent. For instance, The Information reports that only 2 percent of people who own an Amazon Echo use it for voice shopping, one of the most advertised capabilities of smart speakers. When making purchases, users want to browse items, view their options and make comparisons, which is impossible with a device with only a speaker as an output medium.

To that end, Amazon introduced the Echo Show, a smart speaker with a touch screen that can, for example, display a list of timers you’ve set up instead of reading them out for you. Google followed suit earlier this month with the Home Hub.

AR and VR Are Voice Assistants’ True Home

The perfect environments for a voice assistant are settings where users want to perform a variety of tasks while keeping their attention on their surroundings, like augmented and virtual reality applications.

Unlike smartphones and computer applications, AR and VR apps require users to see and interact with their real and virtual surroundings instead of focusing on a display screen. And unlike smart speakers, AR headsets aren’t limited to the tasks you would perform in your kitchen and living room.

Thanks to advances in the underlying technology, AR is showing promise in an increasing number of professional domains, such as manufacturing and healthcare. But one of the main challenges is the user interface. Headsets don’t have keyboards, mice, or touch screens. Users typically interact with applications through hand gestures, controllers, and touchpads on the side of headsets. Some devices also support basic voice commands, but interacting with AR environments is often very challenging.

An AI-powered voice assistant could come in handy, especially when combined with other technologies such as eye tracking. For instance, instead of using hand gestures, users can stare at virtual and physical elements and ask their voice assistant to perform different actions, such as querying for information or activating objects. This is especially useful in settings where users already have their hands full and can’t use hand gestures or controllers.

Magic Leap is working on two AI assistants for its Magic Leap One mixed reality headset, CEO Rony Abovitz told The Verge. One is “a simple robotic creature for performing low-level tasks,” and the other is “a separate human-like entity that you’d treat as an equal, to the point that it will leave the room if you’re rude.”

I don’t agree with Abovitz that digital assistants must have human behavior. Something like Iron Man’s JARVIS would be much more practical and less distracting. Abovitz is on point about this, though — digital assistants will become an integral part of future AR gear.

When augmented reality achieves its full potential and virtual reality devices reach mainstream popularity, digital assistants will no longer be an optional feature to use at your leisure. They will become an inseparable part of your AR/VR experience, helping you accomplish tasks that would be impossible with conventional means of user interaction.

Read more: “Which Mobile Voice Assistant Is Used the Most?”

Originally published at www.pcmag.com.