How Voice Assistants Change The Way We Live (And Code)
We all remember those old sci-fi movies where people had virtual assistants answering all their questions and lived in smart homes with voice-controlled lights, doors, and appliances. 20 years ago it seemed crazy, but not anymore. With the appearance of the first AI assistant Siri in 2011, such solutions became more than real. Today, they make things easier and allow to save time in many areas of our lives. So, let’s take a closer look at this fast-growing technology.
Virtual assistants: the present and the future
Nowadays, almost every major tech giant offers its own digital AI assistant — Siri by Apple, Cortana by Microsoft, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa are among the most popular ones. They all started as solutions for mobile phones and PCs, and later some of these companies developed so-called smart speakers supporting the same technology — Google Home and Amazon Echo.
According to recent data, 19.7% of U.S. adults own a smart speaker, and 42% of U.S. population noted that they used voice assistant on a smartphone. At the same time, almost a third of smart speaker owners use it on a daily basis (1–2 times), and a quarter of them reported even higher numbers — 3 to 5 times per day. Reports indicate that the trends of technology adoption and market growth are ascending — by 2021, the number of virtual assistants’ users is expected to reach 1.8 billion worldwide, while this market will be worth $15.8 billion.
Why are these solutions so popular? Probably, because they can do things for us, and every modern person just needs a bit of help. Among the most common uses of digital assistants are asking questions, playing music streaming services, setting a timer/alarm, checking weather/traffic, calling/messaging someone, listening to the news, checking recipes, managing calendar, and much much more. Just imagine how much time you could save by delegating all these things to someone! And now it can be done in just one sentence.
Virtual assistants are not only changing our everyday lives, but they are also driving a revolution in the IT world. Nowadays, developers are working hard to learn these innovative technologies and build custom solutions. And our team does not stay away from this trend.
Coding for Alexa: Liki experience
Our team is cooperating with the world-known YouTube channel to build the Amazon Alexa app for them. This project is something new for our team, and in general, it’s still quite new to the market, since Amazon solutions exist for 4 years only, and all this time they have been evolving massively. The vast majority of Alexa functionality available to programmers today was either unavailable last year, or looked very different. The good thing is that Amazon ecosystem is very developer-friendly — we can simply write the code that we need, add it to the existing ecosystem and it will work. This makes things much easier, since very often we write a little bit of backend to perform a small task, which requires a huge server to support it. Within the Amazon ecosystem, it’s no longer an issue.
From idea to solution
Our goal was to create a solution allowing Amazon Alexa users to give voice commands for playing specific video from this channel, stop or change it, as well as go back it later. Together, they are referred to as a “skill” in the Amazon console, and our task is to create and communicate this skill using predefined keywords. When the users say these words or phrases, Alexa devices will recognize them and trigger the start of requested programs. A background application used for this communication is written in C# and posted into Amazon Lambda cloud.
In terms of this project, we’ve also decided to provide additional functions for the owners of Echo Spot and Echo Show devices (the ones with a screen) — touchscreen with a clickable list of videos, and the possibility to watch them on the device. We’re currently developing these functions using APL (Alexa Presentation Language). This technology is very recent (4 months old), so there’s not much support and documentation available, and it feels like we are among the pioneers discovering this language. It’s kind of a challenge, but we like it, and will keep you updated on our progress.
Did you know, that many global leaders, including Amazon, Uber, Spotify and Whirpool, have already embedded voice-controlled solutions into their product offering? If you are willing to boost your business with a customized voice-controlled solution, our team will be happy to assist you with that!
Special thanks to our team members Tomasz Buba and Zbigniew Krawczyk for contributing to this material.
