Back in June, a lot of us got a nice chuckle when George DeMarco, chairman of the Electronic Security Expo (ESX), opened the Ft. Worth, Texas, show by having an on-stage conversation with Alexa as part of a three-person – err…entity – roundtable discussion. Turns out, a lot of us are having similar conversations every day.
For the holidays this year, my parents had no idea what to give me and my wife, but they knew that we are into technology and that we have a bunch of smart home gadgets – so they “defaulted” into gifting us Alexa, ie. the Amazon EchoDot. Ironically, my first thoughts went back to George’s exchange back at ESX; my second was, what will I use this for?
I got a quick answer. After setting her up, my kids – ages 4 and 8 – jumped all over it, asking question after question, making her jump through hoop after hoop; until instead of me saying “Alexa, stop,” I was saying “Boys, enough already!”
Smash cut to me 45 minutes after they went to bed: “Alexa, turn on the foyer light”… “Alexa, fire up my guitar jams playlist”… “Alexa, arm-stay my alarm system”… “Alexa, what time is it again?” Seems like I was having as much fun as my kids were, but the point here should not be lost on residential security providers, nor their commercial brethren.
Virtual Personal Assistants, or VPAs, are here to stay – and their capabilities are merely scratching the surface. It all started with Siri and has now expanded to include her next-gen sister, Viv – along with Andy and Alfred and Cortana and M and so many more, including Alexa. VPAs represent a shift in how people interact with machines now and in the future.
Most encouragingly, a vast number are available as part of connected home hubs, where smart devices can be easily controlled by voice. The rest are available on the most dominant mobile platforms in the universe: iOS, Windows and Android devices.
“We predict that by 2020, 40 percent of mobile interaction will be facilitated by smart agents as the post-app era starts to dominate,” writes IT research firm Gartner. “Already, 74 percent of smartphone users currently use VPAs frequently, at least one a day (38 percent) and several times a week (36 percent).
“VPAs and their services are becoming richer – we saw new smart features in Cortana at Build 2016 and recently the new Google Assistant,” Gartner adds. “This opens up new opportunities for device vendors, ecosystem owners and VPA developers to differentiate themselves by creating smarter solutions.”
For me, my kids symbolized the huge opportunity that VPAs can represent to the security industry. Millennials and the next generations of kids will all be quite used to voice-prompted systems, and as Gartner says, these systems are only getting better over time. It is just another in a long line of ways that new technology is going to make a serious dent in the penetration rates of security and smart home devices. And much the same way that smart home devices are seeping into the world of commercial security, the same should happen with VPAs and building automation.
Need more proof? Just browse the news and press releases coming out of this year’s CES show. Vendor after vendor is announcing compatibility and integrations with Alexa, Google Assistant and more. If a vendor’s smart device isn’t compatible with a VPA, they are finding themselves behind the curve.
Security providers should be getting the message as well. Some smart residential security providers already have built-in voice control; others have built apps for the different VPA platforms. Before you know it, everyone will be talking to their systems.
Paul Rothman is editor-in-chief of Security Dealer & Integrator (SD&I) magazine. Access the current issue, full archives and subscribe at www.secdealer.com.
