Page 15 - Fortune-November 01, 2018

ar tifi c i al intelli gence + t h e b a t t l e f o r v o i c e

SALES OF SMART SPEAKERS ARE GROWING FAST… …AND GOOGLE IS NIPPING AT AMAZON’S LEAD.

FORECAST OF SMART SPEAKER SHIPMENTS 100% PROJECTED INSTALLED BASE OF SMART SPEAKERS
100 million 101.1
90.3 75 AMAZON ALEXA 29.8%
80 74.8 67.5%
60 50
33.5%
GOOGLE ASSISTANT
40 34.7
25 APPLE
20 27.8% 32.0% SIRI
OTHERS 4.7%
0 0
2017 2018 2019 2020 2017 2018 2019 2020
SOURCE: CANALYS SOURCE: CANALYS

in artificial intelligence, is the user interface of OICE RECOGNITION HAS BEEN the next killer app
tomorrow. And it promises to have a democra- for decades. In the 1950s, Bell Labs created a
tizing impact on an industry that has separated V system called Audrey that could recognize the
novices from experts. “Voice enables all kinds spoken digits one through nine. In the 1990s,
of things,” says Nick Fox, a Google vice presi- PC users installed Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a
dent who oversees product and design for the program that could process simple speech without the speaker
Google Assistant and Search. “It enables people having to pause awkwardly after each word. But it wasn’t until
who are less literate to use the system. It en- Apple unleashed Siri on the iPhone in 2010 that consumers got
ables people who are driving. It enables people a sense of what a voice-recognition engine tied to massive com-
while cooking to hear a recipe. Every once in a puting power could accomplish. Around the same time, Ama-
while there is a tectonic shift in technology, and zon, a company full of Star Trek aficionados—and led by a true
we think voice is one of those.” Trekkie in CEO Jeff Bezos—began dreaming about replicating
For all that, voice recognition remains in its the talking computer aboard the Starship Enterprise. “We
infancy. Its applications are rudimentary com- imagined a future where you could interact with any service
pared with where researchers expect them to through voice,” says Amazon’s Prasad, who has published more
go, and there’s a significant ick factor associ- than 100 scientific articles on conversational A.I. and other
ated with voice. Legitimate concerns linger as topics. The result was Alexa, a multifaceted device designed to
to how much the tech companies are eaves- let consumers communicate more easily with Amazon.
dropping on their customers—and how much As voice recognition improves—which it does as computing
power they are accumulating in the form of power gets faster, cheaper, more ubiquitous, and thus more
data derived from the spoken information mainstream—Amazon, Google, Apple, and others can more
they are collecting. “With A.I. voice recogni- easily build a seamless network where voice links their smart
tion, we’ve gone from the age of the biplane home devices with other systems. It’s possible for Apple CarPlay
to the age of the jet plane,” says Mari Osten- users, for example, to tell Siri on the drive home to slot the latest
dorf, a professor of electrical engineering at episode of Game of Thrones as “up next” on their Apple TV and
the University of Washington and one of the to command their HomePod to play it once they’ve arrived. Two
world’s top scientists on speech and language years ago, Google released its voice-enabled Home that ties
technology. She notes that computers have together its music offerings, YouTube, and its latest Pixel phones
gotten good at answering straightforward and tablets. Each tech giant, in other words, sees voice as a
questions but still are relatively hopeless when tether to the myriad digital products it is creating.
it comes to actual dialogue. “It’s truly impres- The combatants, each wildly profitable and therefore able
sive what Big Tech has done in terms of how to fund ample research and marketing efforts, bring different
many words voice A.I. can now recognize and assets to the table. Apple and Google, for example, own the
the number of commands it can understand. two dominant mobile operating systems, iOS and Android,
But we’re not in the rocket era yet.” respectively. That means Siri and Google Assistant come pre-

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