As exposed in this interesting Bloomberg article ‘Making Sense of Amazon’s Alexa Spaghetti Strategy‘, it seems that Amazon has decided that the future of home-based AI will be driven by speech rather than other interfaces – and it is driving hard suppliers to adapt their hardware accordingly.
Although speech is the most natural communication channel, I am still quite reluctant. First, I am not yet ready to have at home a device which function is to listen to all that is being said to try to figure out if something has been requested. Also, I believe that speech has a lot of impediments: accents in foreign languages, substantial chances of misunderstanding, etc. On the other hand, it may be quite convenient to give instructions by speaking as long as they can be clearly understood and it avoid having to grab some hardware such as phone or tablet to give instructions.
In summary, I am not yet ready to give voice instructions to my microwave to cook my spaghettis, but I am interested to see if that’s really the future world we will live in. At least Amazon seems to believe that it is. Interesting times!
