BETTER LIVING THROUGH SMARTER TECHNOLOGY

BY ALEX COX

> EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT…

SMART SPEAKERS

There have been some significant changes in the smart speaker world, and not just on the outside

When you think about it, it’s quite amazing how quickly smart speakers have become so completely normalized. Speech recognition has been around in some limited form since the 1960s when IBM built the Shoebox, capable of recognizing 16 words and numbers. In the mid–1990s, Dragon Dictate introduced reasonable (though sometimes comically imprecise) speech recognition on the desktop as long as you were willing to invest around twice the price of a computer to pick up V1 of its software. You could argue that it was Apple that brought voice tech to the masses with Siri, though Siri actually started development in 1993; Siri Inc was snaffled up by the Cupertino giant in 2010, and hit the iPhone in 2011.

But to look at any company other than Amazon as the cause of the spectacular growth of smart speakers would be to look in completely the wrong direction. Alexa, first introduced with the Amazon Echo exclusively for Amazon Prime members in 2014, beat Microsoft’s Cortana to the market and came two years before the Google Assistant. That first Echo caught a huge amount of press and public attention: here was something brand new in the tech field. A self–contained AI brain, squashed into a speaker that wasn’t too bad at pushing out a tune. Amazon expanded its capabilities with Alexa Skills, it released a friendly API with terms of use acceptable enough that all and sundry began building compatible smart devices. It made the voice assistant a thing.

FLAT–BOTTOMED SPHERES

That’s not to discount the contribution that Amazon’s competitors made. Were Alexa an island, Amazon might have rested on its laurels. But Alexa showed the world what was possible, it kick–started the second wave of the smart home, and it made those competitors possible. Some fell on their faces — even Microsoft is backing down on Cortana a little and the Samsung–only Bixby is of questionable usefulness. But we’ve been left with a big–three of AIs and a big–three of speakers: Alexa in Amazon’s Echo line, Google Assistant in the recently rebranded Nest range, and Siri in the HomePod. All three are headed towards the next stage of smart speakers.