Slashdot Mirror
Voice Is the Next Big Platform, But Amazon Already Owns It (backchannel.com)
Six million homes already have an Amazon device with it Alexa voice assistant -- about 5% of all households. But Backchannel argues that Amazon is already dominating the race to become the operating system for future voice-activated devices, with Forrester tech analyst James McQuivey pointing out that "having microphones in your environment is a lot more convenient than pulling out your phone."
The Alexa-enabled Echo is a true unicorn, one of those rare products that arrives every few years and fundamentally changes the way we live... After years of false starts, voice interface will finally creep into the mainstream as more people purchase voice-enabled speakers and other gadgets, and as the tech that powers voice starts to improve.
Despite competition from Google Home, and a rumored "Home Hub" from Microsoft, Amazon "has a two-year jump on its competition, having first introduced the Echo speaker in November 2014," notes the article, adding that Amazon also "opened its platform early to third-party developers." (Alexa now has more than 5,000 "skills".) They argue that Amazon is already winning the war of the operating systems by familiarizing consumers with "a new computing interface -- a voice devoid of a screen -- that will eventually grow to be more ubiquitous and more useful than our smartphones... Soon, you'll speak your wants into the air -- anywhere -- and a woman's warm voice with a mid-Atlantic accent will talk back to you, ready to fulfill your commands."
Despite competition from Google Home, and a rumored "Home Hub" from Microsoft, Amazon "has a two-year jump on its competition, having first introduced the Echo speaker in November 2014," notes the article, adding that Amazon also "opened its platform early to third-party developers." (Alexa now has more than 5,000 "skills".) They argue that Amazon is already winning the war of the operating systems by familiarizing consumers with "a new computing interface -- a voice devoid of a screen -- that will eventually grow to be more ubiquitous and more useful than our smartphones... Soon, you'll speak your wants into the air -- anywhere -- and a woman's warm voice with a mid-Atlantic accent will talk back to you, ready to fulfill your commands."
Some remote server listening in on everything I say, filtering every word, analyzing each sentence, etc.
Say one wrong thing, and the appropriate authorities are automatically informed and dispatched automatically. Tax evasion? IRS shows up at your door. Diesel fuel and fertilizer? FBI. Feel like killing your manager who's been driving you nuts all week? Local police.
Sign me up.
I don't understand why none of this stuff operates locally. It's always some remote server in the cloud. I remember having IBM ViaVoice (back then I think it was called "Voice Type Dictation" or "SimplySpeaking") on my goddam Pentium 75mhz computer. After about an hour of training, it would nail mostly everything I said. I find it incredibly difficult to believe that we don't have the hardware resources necessary to perform local speech-to-text and text processing inside your house without ever touching the internet.
(read in a woman's warm voice with a mid-Atlantic accent) ...and your computer will listen to everything in mic range. No need for that activity light on the mic/camera; it was operated by proprietary (read: always untrustworthy) software to begin with, and wasn't present on trackers (a more honest name for the devices also known as cell phones, mobile phones). You'll come to expect omnipresent listening, ostensibly waiting for you to give the command to signal that the computer should do something for you so you feel like you're in control. But in reality your computer has been doing something for so many proprietors all along—letting an uncountable number of parties spy on you. Because you brought these devices and services into your home, your car, and your workplace. Revel in the convenience of never really knowing if you're alone.
And don't worry: they're not spying on you for your safety. The spying "feature" works on your tracker, your home computers, and various needlessly Internet-enabled devices like your next refrigerator, a child's toy, a lightbulb socket, and more.
Digital Citizen
Microsoft is still trying to live in its halcyon days when it seemed Microsoft could kill competition's products just by announcing that they had a similar product in beta.
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If it weren't for Microsoft's stranglehold on corporate computing, Microsoft would have been a footnote by now...