According to research, voice assistants like Google Assistant and Alexa can increase the number of voice commands to more than 275 million in 2023. VUIs (voice user interfaces) were not initially quite successful; they were unable to pick off words from human conversations and often struggled to make sense of different accents.
However, in the last decade, the progress in artificial intelligence and its applications, such as artificial machine learning and neural networks, IoT, and big data, has sped up the evolution of the voice user interfaces.
As a result, IT giants such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon are fiercely competing to win the much-vaunted race. This effect has snowballed into different industries such as finance, banking, supply chain, manufacturing, and retail. More importantly, it is transforming the way humans are going to live their lives in the future, away from “clicks” and “taps” to “hands-free” interaction with their computing devices.
Context Matters
In the future, incorporating context can truly integrate voice commands into human lives. For instance, today if you ask a voice user interface like Google Assistant, “When is it going to rain tomorrow?” it can guess that you are going to follow it up with a question about the specific areas that can expect rain.
Therefore, you can now expect voice technology to store context permanently. With “continued conversation,” VUI can take note of command and answer it, but it does not stop processing it, .i.e. it continues to evaluate the next series of questions based on a single command.
Voice Tones
Often, when you begin a voice command and take a pause to think further, VUIs mistake it as the end of the question and reply instantly. In the future, VUIs can be empathetic, .i.e. they can interpret a wide range of human emotions and extract the right meaning out of them, thereby offering much more real-world experience.
Unique Identities
If someone else uses your computer or phone, the device can never identify them from you because mere taps and clicks cannot reflect a distinct imprint from your identity. On the other hand, VUIs can categorize users based on their voices. Voice skills mean that if five different users in a family ask questions such as,
- When is my meeting?
- At what time is my lecture today?
- When do I have to perform the laundry?
Then VUIs can evaluate the speaker of each voice command and make use of its knowledge base to create the appropriate response. Therefore, each user can have their own customized VUIs that can understand them and save them from repeating redundant information.
Final Thoughts
Voice commands may exist as the future of human interactions; however, there has to be an infrastructure that can support the growth of voice technology. As such, Tantiv4 has made deep inroads in this regard with the release of ThingaOS™, an IoT-based SaaS platform, targeted towards residential and commercial space & device manufacturers. ThingaOS™ supports all the voice interfaces of all major ecosystems like Apple, Amazon, and Google; it has the potential to revolutionize the voice technology space.