The Rise of Voice-Activated Devices | KOA EDI

Electronic , voice-activated assistants have become increasingly popular in recent years as they’ve revolutionized the way we interact with technology. Long gone are the days when you had to type in your query into a search engine; now, you can just ask the electronic assistant a question or issue a command, and the device will comply with your request. But virtual assistants weren’t always this advanced.  

In fact, personal assistants became available to the broader public not so long ago, during the early 2010s. However, they actually evolved from simple voice recognition systems that date back 70 years. Yes, you read that right; Bell Labs’ “Audry” from 1952 was one of the earliest speech recognition systems that could recognize spoken numerical digits.  

Fast forward to the mid-1970s, when Carnegie Mellon University developed “Harpy,” which could recognize approx. 1,000 words. It was a rather significant development, as it marked an early application of search algorithms in voice recognition. Most consumers wouldn’t encounter voice assistants by the late 1990s when voice-activated dialing was introduced to cell phones.  

In fact, many mobile phones from the early-to-late 2000s incorporated voice-activated dialing, with later models featuring the first versions of voice-activated assistance in very early smartphones, such as premium-tier Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones. However, the first modern voice-activated assistant emerged in 2011 when Apple introduced Siri on the iPhone 4s in October 2011.  

We can now say, with quite a bit of certainty, that Siri was the first voice-controlled personal assistant platform to gain widespread attention and use. And it really revolutionized how we use our phones. Setting alarms no longer involved tapping and scrolling on the touchscreen. Instead, all you had to do was ask Siri to set an alarm for you at the desired time.  

Of course, Siri’s capabilities extend beyond the user’s time management. Google, who had previously purchased Android, sought to compete with Apple in the domain of personal assistants by launching Google Now as part of the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update in 2012, which integrated voice search with predictive, personalized information.  

In response to Apple and Google, Microsoft launched Cortana as part of its ecosystem in 2014. Unfortunately, Cortana never received much attention, and the system was put to rest this year. But Cortana wasn’t the only assistant that launched in 2014; Amazon Echo, which features its own voice assistant, Alexa, also launched in 2014.  

Alexa was revolutionary in her own right; the Echo can be completely integrated with  smart home systems , granting Alexa the ability to exert a degree of control over the smart home’s systems at the request of the user. And its capabilities have expanded significantly since then. In 2016, however, Google began phasing Google Now out in favor of its newly released Google Assistant.  

Most electronic assistants, such as Amazon Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant, have become integral parts of our smart devices—they do all sorts of stuff for us, like provide weather updates, set reminders, and add stuff to our shopping lists. Thanks to their ability to understand context and provide personalized responses, virtual personal assistants have become irreplaceable in our daily lives. 

Smart speakers, such as Echo and Google Home, powered by voice assistants, are becoming more and more popular for the previously mentioned reasons. They integrate into our homes, help us throughout our daily lives, and procure answers to the queries we previously had to type into the search engine. 

Furthermore, they took accessibility a step further; their nature allows people struggling with traditional interfaces to interact with various devices in a more intuitive and user-friendly manner. Anybody with a power of speech can use and benefit from this technology. And we can expect more advancements thanks to strides made in machine learning and natural language processing.  

In the end, we can’t deny the fact that the rise of electronic assistants changed the way we interact with technology and that they play a crucial role in shaping the technology and human-computer interactions of tomorrow.