Notes from #WebSummit: On the brink of a voice-enabled world?

How Amazon uses voice enabled technology to push the limits of innovation.

Details
Date: November 8, 2017
Time: 12:40
Conference stream: AutoTech / TalkRobot

Speakers
Al Lindsay, VP of Alexa & Echo Speech, Amazon
JP Mangalindan, Technology Reporter, Yahoo Finance

Web Summit Summary
Voice technology is emerging as the interface of the future, and conversational artificial intelligence is driving this transformation in how humans interact with machines. Learn how Amazon is using machine learning and cloud computing to fuel innovation as it builds the next generation of voice-first user experiences.

Main Theme

The capabilities of the first Amazon Echo brought something new to the market — the ability to speak to a device with accurate wake word capability and speech recognition. It was like nothing we had experienced before. Al Lindsay, VP of Alexa & Echo Speech at Amazon sat down to chat about what’s changed in the last three years since Echo’s release and what is on the horizon for Amazon as we delve deeper into artificial intelligence and voice technology.

Key Points

Amazon continues to iterate on the product by adding new features from customer feedback. They use machine in dozens of places, from speech recognition, to understanding the intent of a request, to personalizing the experience and learning from users behaviours. These are the aspects that differentiate Alexa and Echo from everything else on the market:

• The key to Alexa’s rapid growth? Their third party ecosystem. The power of releasing public APIs means Alexa can be anywhere you want to be from appliances to autos due to third parties adding the Alexa technology in places even Amazon couldn’t imagine.
• As for Amazon’s long term vision, Amazon continues to focus on the power of voice technology. Al explained that voice is a natural interface and is going to be in everything we do in the future. The fact that there’s no learning curve with speech like there is with other methods since we use voice since birth gives it an advantage over other emerging technologies. There is no need to train others on how to use voice enabled technology, you just talk as you would to another human.
• Already some kids have grown up knowing to speak to devices and are confused why a fridge won’t talk back. While children have become very used to visually interacting and tapping on devices, voice is more intuitive. But Al understands that graphic interfaces can help support voice commands and should act as a accompaniment and not a replacement. He gave use cases like weather and recipes where voice controls and GUIs work in tandem for the ultimate user experience.
• As for how Alexa will evolve, it’s opened up API means it’s use is only constrained to our imaginations. Alexa has already explored uses in other verticals such as in the workplace and hospitality industry. Hotels have started putting then in the hotel rooms for automation and voice lends itself well to removing friction from the workplace where there are inefficiencies. Another prominent place for Alexa is bringing these capabilities to home automation, something that is already on the horizon with Amazon’s partnerships with BMV and Ford.

Reflections

This discussion didn’t bring any value to me due to it’s vagueness. Al didn’t have any numbers to back up his talking points and only used anecdotes throughout. They only touched briefly on what’s next for voice but instead of talking about what is on Amazon’s immediate roadmap, I would have preferred a discussion on the longer term vision.

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