Imagine, you are standing in your room and want to listen to a song. How would you play the song? You would probably get your phone or laptop and go to Spotify. Imagine you are sitting on your couch and want to order some food. How would you order your food? You would probably get your phone or laptop to order on Thuisbezord.nl, Foodora or Uber Eats. Imagine, you want to set your alarm clock, check your calendar, check the weather, check today’s traffic… believe me if I say this can all be done with one device without having to touch the device. Google Home, Amazon Echo or Apple HomePod, here is an introduction to the smart speaker: the home assistant that you can interact with on a day to day basis.
What exactly is a smart speaker? A smart speaker is a wireless speaker with voice control built into them. Therefore, you can shout commands at the wireless speaker to make it do things, making it a smart speaker. The speakers are equipped with artificial intelligence from Amazon, Apple, Google or Microsoft, in other words a voice-controlled personal assistant.
What can you do with a smart speaker? The actions the smart speaker can perform depend largely on the artificial intelligence technology the speaker possesses. This means that it depends heavily on the applications the AI is able to connect to. This is where the battle between the large technology companies begins. As we speak the companies are trying to develop the most advanced home speaker. To give an indication of the capabilities of the smart speaker let’s take Amazon Echo. Amazon Echo is compatible with third-party apps as National Rail, Just Eat, Uber, Lyft, Expedia, Fitbit, Plex, Tube status updates, Google Calender and Amazon Music. The graph below shows what the smart speaker is used for the most in the US.
https://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_9579_smart_speaker_use_cases_n.jpg
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As the graph above shows currently Amazon Echo is the market leader, but is seriously challenged by Google, Apple, Microsoft and Sonos as you can see in the picture.
As you can imagine the possibilities are endless with the smart speaker. Soon they we do not want to live without them. Are you ready for the smart speaker? In the next blog I will touch upon the drawbacks of the smart speaker.
https://www.whathifi.com/advice/smart-speakers-everything-you-need-to-know
https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2017/09/27/smart-speakers-latest-audio-device-we-cant-live-without
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/smart-speaker
https://i2m.tudocdn.net/img/max_width1000/id241330_1.jpg
http://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_9579_smart_speaker_use_cases_n.jpg
