Going forward, software in products like Amazon Echo Studio will feature give and take conversations.
Sarah Tew / CNET
If you use Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant regularly, you may have noticed something new recently: Alexa is starting to ask questions. These are called Hunches, about what you may have read when they were announced two years ago, and they happen when Alexa tries to anticipate your requests, for example, reminding you to close the door at night. The hunches are just the beginning.
During this week Alexa Live Developer Conference, Amazon announced another new update: give and take conversations with the voice assistant. Third-party developers are already implementing the tools for such conversation, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to hear Alexa, in the coming months, start asking follow-up questions after giving the usual commands.
These may seem like incremental improvements, but they could dramatically change the way we understand and use voice assistants. After all, we’ve seen movies where AI creations joke around with their creators, but few of us have spent time wondering if they really want spending a lot of time chatting with Alexa over coffee every morning. Most importantly, we have not sufficiently dealt with the costs of such advances.
The power of Alexa.
It is almost a past to speak of the immense treasures of data companies such as Amazon and Google that they can take advantage of today, but that data is the fuel that powers the proverbial smart home engine, and Alexa is the fracking device that brings it together .
Amazon’s launch of the Echo Dot with Clock last year gave a small window into the usefulness of such data: Alexa answers questions about the time of day more than a billion times a year, so Amazon created a device to answer that. ask more effectively. It’s simple supply and demand, but where Amazon can quantify demand with unprecedented precision.
The 2019 Clock Echo Dot represents Amazon’s data collection tools in action.
Chris Monroe / CNET
Now Amazon is testing more proactive behaviors for Alexa, having the wizard prompt users occasionally, and the company can track the success rate on those predictions in real time. People are responding positively (that is, affirming the actions suggested by Alexa) “the vast majority of the time,” according to Amazon’s vice president of Smart Home, Daniel Rausch.
Rausch and I spoke on the phone before the developer conference and was as excited as ever for the innovations in the voice-driven smart home space. He said more developers than ever are designing Alexa skills and devices to work with the voice assistant (more than 750,000 registered for the conference) and it’s cheaper than ever to incorporate Alexa compatibility on any given device, at a staggering price. from $ 4.
Growth in third-party development means that the instant feedback loop, in which Amazon can deploy features, test them, and receive immediate customer response data, is only growing in value for Amazon, especially as they move further into territory of unknown consumers.
Amazon’s voice assistant is being done at home on more than at home, thanks to the Alexa app, Echo Auto, and other devices outside the home.
Tyler Lizenby / CNET
Perhaps, like the hours of time we spend on our phones each day, we will reach a new standard without having time to seriously consider the route we are taking, the destination that lies ahead. Or perhaps, the time to consider such things is now.
Visions of the future
The EU is investigating Google, Amazon and other tech giants. precisely because of this type of data-driven market dominance in the smart home space in Europe, although the stated objective is to maintain healthy competition.
Another type of investigation, formal or informal, is in order: what exactly could be the unforeseen results of expanded voice technology? Is there a way to progress technologically without risking such results?
Daniel Rausch and others at Amazon often hesitate to talk about specific goals in the far future, but the investment the tech giant is making in its voice technology tells us more than you might think about the vision Amazon is pursuing. It is a vision that is both exciting and worrying.
We are not likely to reach science fiction levels Iron ManMoon o its Too soon, but as we get used to a way of interacting give and take with Alexa, we are moving towards voice technology that takes a much more central place in our daily lives. As Rausch told me on the phone, Alexa usage has quadrupled in the past two years, and the increase in Alexa usage is not linear – growth over the next year will likely outpace growth over the past year.
As Alexa and other voice assistants find homes on new devices, they control our TVs, phones and even microwave oven – and as they become more predictive and proactive in their interactions with us, we could see that the voice landscape changes dramatically in shorter and shorter periods of time.
The Amazon Basics microwave is likely just an early example of what will normalize in the next decade: voice-powered devices.
Tyler Lizenby / CNET
More specifically: Within a year, we could see Alexa (and other voice assistants) hear you enter the kitchen using skills similar to Alexa Guard (which can distinguish between human and pet footsteps), ask if you want to preheat the oven for your regular lunch, etc., all without notice. Many customers can be happy with such convenience, even given the cost of privacy it represents.
It’s not just privacy that’s at stake: People turn to voice assistants for information about COVID-19, about mental health, exercise, and more, and Alexa provides the skills, sometimes hundreds of skills, to address such needs. As an Atlantic writer pondered the future of voice assistants: “With their perfect cloud-based memories, they will be omniscient; with their occupation of our most intimate spaces, they will be omnipresent. And with their mysterious ability to provoke confessions, they could acquire remarkable power over our emotional lives. “
As Alexa changes, so do we. Many of us who use voice assistants regularly have found tricks to interact with them. Alexa never understands when I ask her for Teyana Taylor’s KTSE album, for example, so I have to play an individual song and then tell the assistant to “play this entire album”. My wife, who is convinced that Alexa is sexist for never understanding her orders, as well as the assistant understands mine (“I have more practice”, I always assure you that I am only sure of myself), is much more willing to insult to Alexa. and, curiously, apologize.
I’m concerned with how our 3- and 4-year-old assistants will interact with voice assistants, and I honestly don’t know what kind of interaction is “correct” anyway.
In short, Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri and many other assistants are changing privacy rules, changing culture, and changing us.
Cameras connected to Alexa and other voice assistants only add another layer of complexity to the conversation.
Chris Monroe / CNET
Can we preserve our privacy, and ourselves, and also experience the comfort that such advancements bring? If we try, it will certainly slow things down, something companies like Amazon probably want to avoid.
Privacy policy, messy as it is, is important here. Invoices like California CCPA (which only started to be applied from July) help to cite companies for violating the privacy of users or for not adequately informing users about the data collected from them. Such bills, with the rapid expansion of voice technology and smart home, should be living documents, developed in conjunction with Alexa and other voice assistants, challenging them when appropriate.
On an individual level, privacy hygiene is still worth practicing – deleting apps from your phone if you don’t use them regularly, opting for the strictest privacy options from social media and voice assistants, etc. More fundamentally, now is the best time to start asking ourselves what want our future, and how much access voice assistants should have to our lives, our homes, and ourselves.
Echoes of the past.
If a time traveler from the future had told us in 2007 the trouble sleeping and changes in behavior touchscreens will mark the beginning of our lives, would they or should they have changed the trajectory of our phone innovations in the next thirteen years to 2020?
If the answer is yes, then another question is worth asking: As we see Amazon actively build towards a future that centrally positions its voice assistant at home, should we do more to protect the privacy we have left?
