Sorry, but the future isn’t voice, either

The phenomenal rise of Amazon’s Alexa, and its run against Google Home and Siri, has us aquiver again with talk of the war for voice, and who will win it. We all love a good competition, but the commentators are missing the point. You might as well have a war for a color or smell.

The future isn’t voice, but integration.

Alexa is a great kitchen computer

Voice isn’t a panacea. There are pretty much two situations where your hands aren’t free and it’s OK to shout commands to a computer. The kitchen, and driving. Other times, it’s pretty obnoxious.

Solving for driving is hard. It involves third party auto manufacturers, a slow product turnover cycle, and a tough deployment environment. Apple and Google went for the car computer option first. Neither are doing great. At least in my car, Android Auto crashes a bunch, and Apple’s CarPlay mapping and voice recognition is so poor as to be a safety hazard.

Amazon’s genius has been to recognize there’s an even bigger market, with much easier conditions to deploy: the kitchen. If you were in any doubt they’re targeting that area, check out the Echo Show, it looks like a recipe book stand.

Our minds are slow to catch up. We’re still prone to thinking that a general purpose laptop or tablet is good enough for the whole house. Think that way and you miss a gap like the kitchen. Computing is cheap enough now that we can have for-purpose machines in every situation that applies.

It’s all about the AI

These for-purpose devices simply have to use the cloud, as the only way they’re truly usable is if they know your context as you go about your day, interacting with the different machines. What use is an amnesiac assistant?

That’s why integration is the key: the experiences that we expect in the future will depend on a cloud that knows a lot about you, so it doesn’t feel like instructing a dumb tin can every time you want to do something.

Lack of integration is also a reason that some early attempts in smart home technology haven’t really brought much, except remote control heartache. I’m looking at you, smart TVs.

So, if you want to handicap winners in the multi-device race, there are two things to watch out for:

• a suite of devices that range over the physical locations in your day, and the tasks appropriate to those times and places, which preserve a consistent interaction model
• an integrated data cloud with strong AI capabilities

My instinct is that an open-standards play will win the day here, that plugging a device into your personal AI ought to have the same conformity you expect from plugging it into a power socket. On the way there, though, expect lot of mini-races, rushes to “win”, and breathless media.

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