Why I’m so excited about voice assistants
A few months back I started experimenting with building voice assistants. (You can follow my journey here, or in Spanish here.) I’ve said before (here) how much I love this technology, but I feel like I’m in the minority.
I set up a Google Alert for when a new article pops up about voice assistants and an overwhelming percentage of these articles seem to be negative, focussing on how people are nervous about how this technology records you, and what the companies who build this technology do with those recordings. While this may certainly be a problem, I think we also have a lot to gain from improving voice technology.
Here are 3 reasons why I am still so excited for the future of voice assistants.
Voice assistants are hands free and eyes free
I have seen a lot of new technologies that focus on better screens, virtual screens, screens on your glasses… But imagine not even needing a screen. In fact, by 2020, Gartner predicts that 30% of web browsing sessions will be done without a screen.
As someone who spends 8+ hours per day staring at a screen for work, and also suffers from migraines, any break from a screen is valued; and when I have a migraine, being able to get stuff done without having to open my eyes is a godsend! Imagine what the opportunities of being able to interact just through voice opens up for people who are more permanently hindered by all manner of physical constraints.
For example, IOT plugs controlled by voice assistants have become popular recently. Think about where your plugs are positioned in your home — quite often low down or in hard to reach places (e.g. behind bookshelves, or hidden behind TVs). Now you can control them with your voice — this isn’t just fantastic for the blind who might not be able to see them, but also those who might be physically inhibited. I found this article really interesting which speaks more on how we can improve accessibility with voice assistants.
Voice assistants are also great for when your hands are full.
It takes me about 40 minutes to curl my hair. With Siri’s help, I now have an extra 40 minutes in the morning to reply to text messages and organise my day while not compromising time spent on things that make me feel good about myself.
Sounds like a first world problem, right?
Well yes, for me, this is perhaps a luxury, but imagine parents who would really value that extra time to be productive while their hands are full — voice shopping whilst simultaneously feeding their child perhaps.
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Voice assistants are faster
I dictated my whole university dissertation to my Mac. (For those that are interested, in Microsoft Word on Mac, go to the Edit menu and click “start dictation”.) I found this a particularly useful feature when quoting scholars. It’s much easier to read the paragraph of text that you want to quote directly to your Mac, as opposed to reading it, remembering a bit, typing it into your essay, going back to the article, remembering a bit more, typing a bit more, and so on…
Whilst voice assistants aren’t always accurate (and that can be incredibly frustrating!) it is still much quicker to correct mistakes than type from scratch every time. In addition, the accuracy of voice technology is improving all the time and even learns from your voice. Back in May, at Google’s I/O Conference, Google CEO, Sundar Pichai claimed that voice technology has the potential to answer a user so fast, that “tapping to use your phone would seem slow”.
I certainly really valued the time saved by dictating my thoughts to my computer, allowing me more time to focus on editing, rewriting, and ultimately delivering a better thesis.
And whilst at University, I found an additional bonus of dictating as opposed to typing, is that you don’t get so distracted by email pop ups or Facebook notifications. This leads to my next point.
Voice assistants can minimise “noise”
I’ve been hearing a lot recently at tech conferences and also from my mother, that tech creates too much “noise”. My mother feels that as my sister and I, millennials that we are, are permanently glued to our phones, we are taking in too much information all the time which is stressful. She’s not wrong.
When I wake up in the morning, my first question is always “Alexa, what’s the weather like today?”. I used to check my phone, get distracted by Instagram/Whatsapp and end up never actually checking the weather. Then later when I was getting dressed, I’d remember I never actually checked the weather, having been distracted by a video of puppies and have to get my phone out again to check what the weather was going to be like so I could work out what to wear. Face. Palm.
With voice apps a simple question qualifies a simple answer.
I have found, the most difficult part of building voice apps is the UX. In order to be useful, the UX has to be so clear and simple. You can read here about some of the amateur mistakes I have made! You have to program exactly all the variations of what a person might say to find something out. Then you have to give your app instructions on how to find the answer and relay it to your user as clearly and simply as possible as the human brain can’t process and remember as much through audio as it can from sight. Google and Amazon have tried to overcome this by developing voice assistant devices with screens, see Google Nest Hub and Amazon Echo Spot and Echo Show. However for the kind of tasks that voice assistants are useful for, for example the kind I have listed in this article (handsfree, eyesfree, fast), I feel having a screen kind of defeats the point. Perhaps what would be better would be to improve the user experience of voice assistants and their apps to work to eliminate some of the problems users find with voice technology. Let’s focus on how voice technology can benefit our users.
