Talking to Our Devices is Becoming the New Normal

Among the most interesting technological advancements of recent years are all of the smart devices that we use our voices to communicate with. While such devices were not difficult to imagine, considering they have been a mainstay of science fiction stories for many decades, the fact that we are actually getting them in our world is an exciting development. While these devices feel ever present right now, we are really just getting started with them, and in the years to come they shall become far more advanced. One of the most prominent brands of them is Amazon’s Alexa, which took ideas that have been long in the making and brought them to the public in a more technologically advanced way than has ever been seen before. While it is just coming to the fore now for the average person, developers have long wished for their computers to be voice-activated, as that is a more natural, intuitive way of communicating than with a keyboard. Of course, talking to a computer is easier said than done, and even the greatest programmers will have a great struggle getting a computer to understand someone as well as another human can, given our biological and cultural evolutions that got us to the point of speech over thousands of millennia. 

However, voice-activated computer products are reaching a point where they are actually getting good, and they will only get better from here. Major companies such as Microsoft and Apple are competing with Amazon to innovate in the field of voice control. This competition will only make the field advance faster, and for now, Amazon seems to be winning the race, though we can expect many twists and turns to come. It makes sense that Amazon would be doing such a good job with its products, considering their goals. After all, Amazon’s goal isn’t to have voice communication for its own sake, it is to make it easier for people to buy things on Amazon. Having a well-developed voice-activated AI is a great way to do that. The Amazon website made spending money on goods easier than ever, and now Alexa has made it even easier. While so far the uses of these technologies have been harmless, there is concern that this won’t always be the case. There is also concern that people will get frustrated having to talk to inanimate objects, especially once they get better at communicating. The better the tech becomes, the more it will approach the “uncanny valley,” and that might turn users off in a way the more primitive versions of the tech do not. However it turns out, it is clear that the future will be here before we know it, if it isn’t here already. Talking to computers is something we need to all start getting used to.