Voice assistants promise a light-fingered future

Tomorrow’s digital interface may be even more revolutionary than the pinching, tapping and scrolling heralded by the smartphone: voice commands promise to unify and tame our digital lives. Tiny speakers visible at every stand at Berlin’s IFA electronics fair, most of them endowed with a feminine voice, are the ears and mouths of the new artificial intelligences. Things haven’t quite reached the fever pitch of 2013’s “Her”, Spike Jonze’s film in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

But industry experts and salespeople paint a glowing picture of a future home in which an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered butler will cater to consumers’ every need via networked appliances.

“This technology is about to play a huge role in our lives. The main question for manufacturers is what technical solution will make it as intuitive as possible,” said Martin Boerner, vice-president of Germany’s information technology industry federation Bitkom.

Industry giants like Google, Amazon, Samsung and Microsoft are battling it out to produce the most responsive voice-controlled AIs, aiming to reduce the amount of time we spend tapping buttons or swiping through lists on our smartphones. Many users check their phones 200 or even 300 times …read more