Voice Control, With Privacy, Personalization Concerns, Has a Way to Go, Panelists Agree
BURLINGAME, Calif. -- Personalization and privacy are among issues affecting how voice control evolves as a primary smart home interface, industry officials said on a panel at Parks Associates’ Connections conference last week. Its research shows using voice to control connected devices is far down the list of consumer uses. Only 10 percent of consumers with voice-based Echo or Google Home speakers -- or an Apple Siri, Google Assistant or Microsoft Cortana app -- used voice to control smart home devices, said analyst Dina Abdelrazik. Apple, which declined to participate on the panel last week, is a “prime contender in the voice-first market” and one of the “big 4” in voice-based personal assistants, Abdelrazik emailed us.
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Benjamin Brown, senior product manager at Google Home, said having voice control for seamless smart home activities “is really powerful.” Brown sees voice as the successor to the app-enabled smartphone, which he called a “vestigial relic” of the remote control that hasn’t provided a smooth control experience.
Amazon “crossed the threshold” in automatic speech recognition, as consumers expect voice “works all the time,” said Dan Quigley, principal technical product manager at Amazon Alexa. Natural language processing adds the ability “to do not only what I say but what I mean,” Quigley said. “Where we’re headed is interactions,” he said, where “it’s not just about control.”
Voice control works well in applications where more than one click of a mouse button or more than one instruction is required, said Rich Kennewick, president of VoiceBox Technologies, which sells its voice control platform to car, home and IoT manufacturers. “Device makers spend a lot of money putting different functions in and people don’t know they’re there or how to find them.”
“There’s a lot more to natural language than just speech,” said Ed Doran, Cortana co-founder and director-program management and product planning at Microsoft, which is researching how context plays into voice control. Getting automatic ambient notifications requires better understanding of context, said Doran. “If I’m driving and get a notification, that’s great,” he said. “If I’m carpooling and get a message that says my rash medication is ready, that’s … inappropriate for the context.” Additional signals are necessary to make the voice interface more engaging: sensing the presence of other people, the identity of the speaker, the location and actions of the communicator, Doran said.
Speech software company Nuance sees voice agents coexisting, said Adam Thibault, senior director-business strategy and development. “We’re all going to cohabitate this space if we’re successful,” said Thibault, who doesn’t envision dominance by one player. He expects ISPs to play a “pivotal role” in advancing voice control as they supply the pipelines into the home for TV and broadband.