Google Assistant Mishaps, Apple’s New Take on Wearables and Alexa Radio Experience
This week’s most important news in the world of Conversational AI
Google Assistant in the news
Google dominated the headlines this week and not all the news has been good. For one thing, the company has experienced an outage of Google Assistant actions when thousands of actions had been down for several days, as part of the company’s mitigation efforts — they are all back now.
Besides, several construction firms have stopped installing Google Nest smart home devices after the tech giant made yet another step toward integrating them into its larger tech ecosystem, which involves Google Assistant too.
On the bright side, Google Assistant now supports Cantonese: both on Google Assistant and Android smartphones, along with the actions on Google software development kit.
Also, store owners in New Zealand beware — the Google Duplex voice AI might be calling you soon to check your hours for New Zealand’s Labor Day and later update Google Maps and search results for your store with the results of these automated calls.
Apple to launch smart glasses
The company’s wearables game is strong: only last week we wrote that there might be an Apple smart ring in the making, and now there’s news about Apple possibly launching AR glasses in 2020. Little is known about the product yet, but who wouldn’t like an iPhone for the eyes?
Alexa meets baseball
Amazon is not only busy cramming their voice assistant into every device imaginable, but they are successfully reshaping our habitual experiences for the voice-first era. Alexa now offers new features for baseball fans, who can now watch and hear game highlights after the game ends. Depending on the device you’re using — a smart speaker or a smart display — the clips can be audio or video. Also, Alexa can provide game reviews to Fire TV owners — both on the whole team did and individual players.
Radio experience of the voice-first era
BBC has launched the UK’s first interactive voice news service for Alexa-enabled smart speakers. Device owners now simply have to say ‘Give me BBC News’. Apart from the news users can access content from specialist reports, interviews, features, flexible bulletins, the BBC archive and more.
9 out of 10 UK residents use voice assistants daily
According to a new survey from Code Computerlove, some 70% of voice assistant device owners in the UK use them daily, and 90% use them at least once a week. People mostly turn to their voice assistant to put on music or radio, hear a weather report and, quite surprisingly, use an egg timer.
