Ever since Ironman and Jarvis formed indefatigable-inseparable duo, World’s imagination has truly been fired with the potential and convenience of Voice Based control.
Even Mark Zuckerberg has Jarvis for himself!
As always, I am mighty impressed with Morgan Freeman in background playing Jarvis but that’s always been there with Christopher Waltz, Amitabh Bachchan, and James Spader – as mellifluous as they get, pure joy to the ears!
Anyways, the reality is much closer with all the voice controlled assistants and hubs from tech powerhouses of the World and they are surprisingly affordable – thanks to the democratization of the Internet and cost/service sharing with Cloud.
While all the Smart Home Voice based assistants whether from Amazon, Apple, or Google are effective in their own rights, voice as a service will always have inherent challenges.
Voice is a great relief when compared to peeking into small handheld dark screen after a hard day’s work or early morning moments of peace, that’s granted, no denying there. But there is a point of diminishing return whereon acceptance of voice starts becoming challenging!
Below I present 5 commandments which are real challenge to the rise of voice command supremacy.
The verbal fatigue: You had a hard day at work, real tough traffic to start with, multiple rounds of discussions at work – some heated ones really, long drive back to work – you are stone tired. Have just enough energy to stretch a bit, lay down quietly, have dinner to some soothing music, catch up with some reading and then mentally prepare yourself for Day + 1. You really want your personal moments to soothe and relax – voice then is definitely not an enabler. You want something real quite non-intrusive and have your moments of calm.
Leave you smiling yet 🙂
Voice is not for the ‘moments of calm’, it’s for ‘moments of energy’ and ‘moments of exuberance’.
The nut on the street: You really don’t want others waiting by your side to know your intimate conversations with your personal assistant. Now would you! That would really be embarrassing in some cases to say the least!
The Ambient noise in the room: Voice assistants are real pain when you are in a room or for that matter any enclosure with some degree of ambient noise in it. Say for example a running fan, or an old air conditioner, or TV playing at normal decibel levels roughly 6 feet away. The voice detection really goes for a toss – first the device has issues initiating to your commands (you might have to repeat the wake up command multiple times each with increasing volume levels till the time the assistant decides to hear you out 🙂 ) and then accuracy of command interpretation gets dodgy, accuracy level drops down big time.
All the assistants come with multiple fail safes and their own way of offering better service.
But there is still a long way to go!
The speed of internet or the lack of it: How fast does your personal assistant respond to you is largely dependent on the kind of internet connectivity that you have!
Whenever you speak into the Smart Assistant, you are actually speaking to a dumb microphone whose job is to pass on the recorded verbal sample to the cloud which in turn processes the voice commands and sends back meaningful responses which then is played back on the device through the speakers.
So the voice sample and the response have a round trip to make – Device to cloud and then back from cloud to the device. Now this transit time is solely dependent on the quality and bandwidth of the internet on your device.
Mind you, a touch based command is far simpler to execute and needs little data, a voice sample is dense and heavy and it needs to be synthesized to be made meaningful.
So, if you are on 2G or have bare internet connectivity, voice is not the option you would like to go for.
The Breach of privacy: All the personal assistants are blabbermouths, the can spill your beans in front of anyone, without any context really! Google home is working to bring about multiple account linking and individual voice recognition, that news has been doing rounds for some time now but the efficacy will still need to be seen.
You ask your assistant to hold a reminder for you; say for example – ‘Hey Google, Remember I kept my wife’s gift under the pillow’, Google assistant will vomit this secret out to anyone including your wife without exercising any discretion and so will the other assistants – All one needs to do is ask!
The Voice recognition and consistency of it: Sometime they just decide to take you for a ride. 🙂 🙂
Yes they do.
It’s too early to let the verdict out but I guess the voice juggernaut will come to a halt and then establish an equilibrium with the Touch. I see the following pattern for future.
Somethings are just too simple & intuitive with touch and interface – like the playlist I am creating for myself right now.
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