Is Voice Control of Smart Home Applications the Next Big Thing?
I’m not at all sure that voice control of household appliances is a good thing. What happens when your systems are voice controlled and you say something unintentionally? I can just picture myself standing in front of the refrigerator with my little Tervis glass while ice flies all over the kitchen because I yelled to my wife on the patio “Hey, did you say you needed a pitcher of ice out there?” Will an argument over the temperature of the air conditioning result in the thermostat throwing up its hands in frustration? And seriously, do you really want to call the repairman and tell him the microphone on your toilet is not working? I’m not ready for this.
While Siri and Google Now are well-established smartphone features, it is in the smart home that voice control systems will live out their full potential. Smart TVs, smart refrigerators, smart plugs, and more will extend the reach and simplicity of managing the smart home environment using voice. With ABI Research forecasting more than 120 million voice-enabled devices to ship annually by 2021, voice control, which combines speech recognition and natural language processing, is quickly becoming the key user interface within the smart home.
“Led by the success of Amazon’s Alexa platform, smart home voice control is creating new competition and demands for wireless speaker and other vendors to include voice capabilities in their devices,” says Jonathan Collins, research director at ABI Research. “But the scaling of voice control applications in the smart home breeds complexity. Vendors will need to evaluate how and when to bring voice control into smart home devices in order to best tackle adding the service into wider smart home systems.”
New microphone-enhanced products will extend the ability to hear voice commands throughout a smart home environment. These will include cameras, doorbells, smart lighting and others. A number of vendors, such as Google with its learning thermostat Nest, are already expanding their products to support listening capabilities.
But tying multiple listening and voice controlled devices together into a coherent smart home system will require a shared voice platform. So far devoid of any standardization, each of the primary home voice platform providers—Apple, Amazon, and Google—all have their own approaches and ways of leveraging their voice capabilities to extend and support their core businesses.
“As more devices support voice control, new voice platforms will increasingly aim to support device and device and service providers,” concludes Collins. “In the past few months, for example, Viv Labs emerged as a company focused solely on extending its voice platform to as many services and devices as possible—without tying it to a sub-strategy of boosting the appeal of a separate core business.”
These findings are from ABI Research’s Voice Integration and Control in the Smart Home. Source: ABI Research Reprinted with permission from RISMedia. ©2016. All rights reserved.
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