This week about 180,000聽visitors flocked to the world鈥檚 biggest technology exhibition, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And while all the usual gadgets made an appearance, from smart fridges to self-driving cars, there was one dominant theme: speech.
奥颈迟丑听聽in their smartphones or tablets, and the ownership of standalone digital assistants, like聽Google Home and Amazon Echo, expected to double in 2018, every tech company now wants a slice of the pie. Alexa, Amazon鈥檚 voice assistant, is now available in everything from microwaves to cars, and from TVs to mirrors.
Google had more than 350聽voice-controlled devices聽at the show, including speakers, cars, and a giant toy town complete with a railway. The toy town showed how Google thinks its assistant can improve your life, with examples ranging from voice-activated vacuuming to ordering a pizza.
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Google says that using its assistant as part of your morning routine could save you 15 minutes every day, and that its assistant is now capable of performing a million actions.
Speak easier
Luxury homeware company Kohler even announced a suite of voice-enabled products powered by Alexa, including a smart shower that learns just how hot you like it and a kitchen sink that can give you exactly the amount of water you ask for. And their pi猫ce de r茅sistance was a $6000 voice-activated smart toilet. It has feet and buttock warmers, as well as mood lighting.
LG unveiled a home-helping robot called Cloi that acts as an intermediary between you and your home appliances. Unfortunately, minutes into an onstage demo, Cloi stopped responding leaving LG鈥檚 vice president of marketing in an聽embarrassing one way conversation.
As anyone who has tried using voice-activated technology will know, it is not yet perfect, but it has聽come a long way recently. The availability of huge data sets and masses of computing power means machine learning algorithms first developed decades ago are now coming of age.
These algorithms are not programmed directly to understand speech, instead they are programmed to learn to do so. This has resulted in algorithms able to聽recognise speech nearly as well as humans聽and for machines to develop a basic understanding of what鈥檚 being said.
The more digital assistants there are, the more data is being collected about how we use them and what we say. That, in turn, improves their abilities leading to them becoming more useful. Digital assistants have skyrocketed in popularity in the last few years, and if CES is anything to go by, that鈥檚 unlikely to stop anytime soon.
