Last Wednesday (4th of October) Google announced that they will add new functionalities to their Google Assistant and they will once again set foot in the hardware market. With the introduction of the Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, Pixel Buds, Google Clips, Google Pixelbook and, new Google Home speakers (including a smart speaker called Google Home Max), Google really tries to compete with Apple and Amazon. Almost all new hardware will have Google’s Assistant incorporated.
A digital personal assistant is nothing new, Apple debuted Siri late October in 2011 (Apple, 2011[1]). At least 3 years ahead of its competition. Amazon announced Alexa back in 2014 (The Verge, 2014[2]) and Google Assistant debuted even later. All these digital assistants have seen an increase in usage and users are getting more and more functionalities from them. In many cases, however, the users are dependent on the developer of the assistant in order to receive new functionalities. Especially Siri is fairly closed and Apple has only allowed developers to use about 9 different functionalities (Apple, 2017[3]). For Apple, their digital assistant, Siri, is the center of their development focus.
With the introduction of Google’s newest hardware, one thing became clear: Google is building their new devices around the Google Assistant. With this approach, it differs a lot from Apple. The newly introduced Google Home Max will be available right now. Just like Amazon’s Alexa, it’s already widely available for the general public. Apple, however, is slacking. There HomePod won’t be available until December (Apple, 2017[4]). In order to compete with Google and Amazon, Siri will have to get some serious improvements and more devices to be available on.
With Google Assistant at the center, Google is really looking at opening up the digital assistant platform for developers. The speech recognition of the Google Assistant is already much better than those of its competitors according to The Verge. The introduction of the new ‘Pay with Google API’ (Androidpolice, 2017[5]) will open-up new possibilities for developers to connect their applications and platforms. The new Home Max speaker is already able to play music from a wide variety of platforms like Spotify and YouTube. Not only adults will benefit from the improved digital assistants. Children will get the opportunity to play games with the Google Assistant. It doesn’t matter if they are alone or with a group, the Google Assistant will help them set up a fun game. Amazon’s Alexa is also putting more focus on families and the versatile use of their digital assistant (CNBC, 2017[6]). It is crucial for Google and Amazon to partner up with well-known content providers for children in order to make this possible. While Amazon is partnering up with Nickelodeon, Google started a partnership with Disney and some other large comic producers. Apple seems to have missed the boat regarding these partnerships.
Whether a digital assistant is something for you is hard to tell. Speaking for myself, I find it difficult to believe that I’ll tell a random speaker in my room to play some music or order me a pizza. On the other hand, it might really make my life easier. It will be interesting to see how the platforms around Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant will grow and whether Apple will catch up. What do you think about the emerging platforms for digitals assistants? And how will they impact our privacy?
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2011/10/04Apple-Launches-iPhone-4S-iOS-5-iCloud/
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/6/7167793/amazon-echo-speaker-announced
[3] https://developer.apple.com/sirikit/
[4] https://www.apple.com/homepod/
[5] http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/04/google-assistant-will-soon-transaction-apps-kid-friendly-features-game-templates/
[6] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/31/alexa-adds-kid-focused-skills-from-nickelodeon-sesame-street-amazon.html
Max van Soest,
379961
Hi Max,
Thank you for your article. I am probably one of the few students that has already equipped the house with a digital assistant and smart home devices, which explains why I believe in the emerging platforms for digital assistants.
Sooner than later, more and more households will embrace smart home devices and as the number of smart home devices increases, so will the number of individual applications on your phone. For instance, when I want to change my Hue lights to blue, I need to open the Hue app and click the colour blue and when I want to check who visited my house, I need to open the Nest app. As the number of smart home devices increases, the need for something that unifies all smart home devices rises.
That something is probably a digital assistant, as it empowers users to control everything with just their voice and without the need to open or learn how all the individual apps work for each smart home device.
As for privacy, I believe the benefits of embracing digital assistants will outweigh the sacrifices made in privacy. Additionally, It is likely that one’s personal information will leak through the usage of different internet accounts with the same or few passwords that people have than by embracing a digital assistant.
Best,
Dai Shen
Hey Max,
Thank you for the article. Very interesting assessment on the world of digital assistants. I myself am a total fan of Alexa and Siri. I find it so nice to be able to take care of small day-to-day tasks on the go just by talking to my smart device. “Alexa can you order some paper towels , Siri how do you say XXX in Dutch, etc”. But I agree, with the rise of usage of these personal assistants, privacy and security are definitely large concerns. For example, if you can pay with Google Assistant, how do you keep your child from being able to access this feature when they are left alone?
Furthermore, as the assistant has various features that help your day-to-day activity, I’m curious what your thoughts are on the Google Assistant app having the capability to listen to noises around its devices. With these improvements to features and improvements being made to the devices, is there a line drawn for where these devices stop assisting and start being intrusive?
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3149085/search/does-google-listen-in-on-your-life.html
Hi Max,
It’s indeed interesting to see how digital assistants evolve and how more and more companies put their resources into AI development. I personally find that not all smart systems are indeed “smart”. The most accurate systems right now still involve some manual input from a user. For example, Hue light system by Phillips that allow you to control your light from home and outside, almost never fails me. This includes voice commands for Siri such as “Siri, switch off the lights” or “Siri, turn on the reading mode”. On the contrary, such digital assistants as Siri are far from what I would call a smart assistant. Even though it is stated that Siri is one of the most accurate systems in the world, with accuracy rate of 95%, my personal accuracy rate would be around 20% based on experience. The reason why Siri is not perfect lies in the fact that Natural Language Processing algorithms that are used for Siri are not perfect. Language recognition is one of the most accurate machine learning algorithms, however, because human language is so complex, I doubt It can ever be 100% accurate. One more reason why artificial intelligence cannot be as accurate as human is because human speech by itself contains lots of mistakes. As humans, we never speak 100% correctly and there are a lot of different language forms like slang, sarcasm, irony. However, I do hope that in future quality of personal assistants will improve and looking forward these times. Who knows, maybe we will find out more about our language when artificial intelligence can finally speak it?
Veranika Parmon