Earlier this year, retailers across the globe descended on Las Vegas in January for the 50th anniversary of CES. This year, CES welcomed more than 3,800 exhibiting companies—from the world’s biggest businesses to more than 600 startups—across 2.6 million net square feet of exhibit space. And through all of this, one theme spoke the loudest: Voice-activated technologies were pervasive, no matter where you looked.
To be sure, there was more innovation and more product and service announcements, than ever before. While walking the show floor, attendees experienced firsthand how technology is impacting almost every aspect of our lives. Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), self-driving cars, smart home, and anytime/anywhere connectivity will become more common in our homes and make our living spaces more personal, customizable and interactive. And throughout, voice recognition is the glue binding all of these life-changing innovations together.
Just Say the Word…
Want to change the temperature of your home, turn on the lights or run your washing machine? What was historically a more cumbersome exercise, has become as simple as the spoken word. Thanks to what we saw at CES, one can now more readily imagine a world wherein you interact with the connected devices around your home from the comfortable confines of your couch.
Voice is poised to propel a number of categories forward. We are already seeing smart home devices gain popularity, and this year, the U.S. adoption of this technology is expected to accelerate further, as consumers find more items than ever on store shelves. The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) forecasts a 63 percent increase in smart home device sales in 2017, resulting in $3.5 billion in revenue.
Voice-controlled, stand-alone digital assistant devices such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home were a central theme at CES. We also saw a number of companies like Lenovo launch hardware taking advantage of these growing platforms. These hub devices are increasingly looking like the common operating system culling together diverse, discrete connected objects appearing throughout the home. CTA predicts 4.5 million units of stand-alone digital assistant devices will sell in 2017, a 50 percent increase from last year, and reach $608 million in revenue (a 36 percent year-over-year increase).
This technology is an excellent case study about the remarkable pace of innovation. We’ve made more progress in voice-recognition in the last 30 months than in the first 30 years. When we started developing voice recognition back in 1995, the word error rate was close to 100 percent—the technology misidentified almost every word that was spoken. But by 2013, that rate fell to roughly 25 percent, as voice recognition correctly identified three out of every four words. Still, missing one key word in a sequence was enough to frustrate most users and keep them from fully deploying the technology. Fast forward to 2017, and the word error rate for voice recognition has dropped to roughly five percent, or approximately the rate at which humans make errors when transcribing spoken words. We’ve reached human parity. Companies are now ready to integrate voice recognition across a myriad of product verticals and consumers are ready to adopt the technology.
From here, we’ll see voice recognition make further inroads into the services we use and the experiences we have. Financial institutions are beginning to test voice as a security mechanism. Being able to identify individuals uniquely will be the next big step for this technology. In this way, my voice-activated in-home experience can be differentiated from that of my sons living in the same house. Personalization and customization become defining characteristics. Eventually, this technology could replace traditional user interfaces for the devices we’ve come to know so well—and even the assistive robots we’ll want to know much better in years to come.
Don’t expect radical shifts in adoption, integration, and behavior overnight, however. The dishwasher debuted in 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair, but for the next 40 years, few households owned one. It was only in post-World War II that kitchen updates including them began in earnest. It took years before other inventions such as indoor electricity, became inexpensive and commonplace enough to make dishwashers applicable.
While the home is the first and most prominent application for voice-control abilities, CES 2017 delivered new announcements in wearables, automotive, video, robotics and more. For example, Ford and Volkswagen are putting Alexa in some of their cars, Martian put Alexa in its mVoice smartwatch, and LG added voice-control capabilities in a refrigerator that also has a 29-inch touchscreen. The list doesn’t end there—the number of devices offering voice-control integration could easily grow by 50 percent this year.
The next decade will bring us a new age of innovation. No single device brought us here—rather, the connectivity of all devices powered the evolution.
While still in a period of massive experimentation, we’re increasingly moving away from what is technologically possible and focusing on what is technologically meaningful in 2017.
