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What are Voice Assistants, Why does AI Future Concern Them?

Published Sep 16, 2019
What are Voice Assistants, Why does AI Future Concern Them?

A few people recognize voice assistants as show off and worthless, for the time being, to say least. True, to some standards we have set for ourselves. But the people who love them can’t imagine living without them, and to be honest, this is the minimum voice assistants are doing, it is only going to get further from here. Voice assistants have quickly advanced from just turning the light ON/OFF to ordering anything you ask them, in the blink of an eye.

Let's get started with what are Voice assistants.

Let’s start this with the most popular example in the history of voice assistants, Alexa. Amazon launched Alexa as an all in one voice assistant, it can control your thermostat, TV, lighting, you name it. Other great contenders to look forward to are Google Home and Apple's HomeKit, and they are trying to match Alexa all the way.

Soon enough, everyone is going to be in the scene, Apple proved it by launching their own HomeKit. All three of them are working hard on it, with Apple taking the low road and focusing least on AI, ensuring the smoothest interface of all three, but of course, comes along limited capabilities of HomeKit.

So, voice assistants are basically faceless, display less, electronic voice to command and action converter. They respond to your voice, use voice to text to decode what you said, and in return give an answer(information) or follow your command. It has one big advantage, you can control everything in your smart home with just your voice. But the plasticky feeling, and of course, the awkwardness of commanding a robot isn’t easy to shake.

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This brings us to the conversation problem.

Voice assistants are good at what they do, but they seriously lack things like keeping a conversation. The base and heart of a voice assistant are AI, somewhere deep down it’s the AI that’s going to improve the conversations. On this day, Voice assistants can only respond to your commands in a single statement, there’s practically nothing neither Amazon nor Google can do to change that.

No matter how much Google and Amazon ignore it, Apple’s embracing it, after all, this is what they built their Apple environment and ecosystem for. Artificial intelligence will take time to be mastered completely, and keeping a conversation with an intellectual is far, pretty far to even think of right now. But every slight improvement in AI means a direct improvement in Voice assistants.

The conversation problem is pretty much here to stay, for now, so we look forward to VUI options.

We as humans are so used to subvocalization, we don’t even realize there’s anything like that. But, talking to a robot makes it so much more awkward, there’s no limit to it. The fact that the need for an interface has always been so good, the experiment to remove it definitely failed. There are still devices we talk to when we integrate it to hidden speakers on the road ahead, we are going to have bigger problems. The need to touch and feel has been our basic necessity from the very start, that’s why we are so hooked to our phones.

Voice assistants were a really great innovation, truly amazing use of AI in voice assistance. A system you can't touch or feel but talk to, and it would get everything you command to it. But we really believe, there’s more to it, and the need to interact in other ways only make us more human. A hologram or a simple touch interface can do wonder for the flawed tech. Another important thing to consider is we don’t like to spit out words all the time, so an optional touch display which can hold all commands is an absolute necessity.

This is where voice assistance particularly depends on the future of artificial intelligence, think of it as an omnipotent assistant. Soon, an array of mics can be placed around your house, you won’t need to shout of anything, just whisper and the work gets done. AI will be heavily assisting on the automating part, which will need more than just an array of mics. The true potential hasn't even been thought of yet, but we will need every bit of AI we can, to see Voice assistants at the epitome of what they can be. We as a PHP development company believes in the idea, to implement things that haven’t yet even been thought of, that is the AI way of innovation.

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What do we get to have right now?

Even though the technology is virtually in infancy, there’s a lot of love and playing around it already. People can’t get over getting things done by their voice, and this makes them crave for more. Starting with just some commands, voice assistants can now do almost everything on the internet. Voice assistants can place, track, re-order and more, every item you buy on amazon. One thing to mention here is, Chatbots too, are advancing at the same pace, both have the same core and yet, are so different from one another.

We have three of the greatest tech companies, Apple, Google, and Amazon, focusing a chunk of their AI and expertise on voice assistants. The need for it for those who already use it can’t be suppressed now, and that’s why we told you it only goes further from here. Top technology is going to make it easy by combining AI, IoT, and of course, voice assistants to create a space that every human crave.

Conclusion

So, this was the scene of the uber-popular voice assistants in current tech phase. Artificial intelligence future depends on quite a lot of voice assistant’s likeability, this is the key to invest in AI full-fledged. IoT has also improved a lot to complement the capabilities of voice assistants, as soon as we have 5G, things are going to take a boost. The main reason for this is the high-speed connection that 5G boasts, making IoT so much more capable, for all the good in the world for voice assistance.

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