Smart Speaker Essay

Smart Speaker

Smart Speaker, or some people may call it voicebot, became a really big hit in 2017. There already exist dozens of Smart Speakers on the market in 2018 and there are even more on their way. In May, 2018, 21.6% of American adults own a Smart Speaker, or in other words, around 54.4 million. Among them, 65% say they won’t go back to life where there is no Smart Speakers. Generally speaking, smart speak is a type of voice interaction device that contains a traditional loudspeaker and a virtual assistant which uses artificial intelligence technology. This is not a brand new technology. According to a report, Amazon had been developing Echo devices no later than 2010. First unveiled in 2014 with Echo, Amazon Alexa now has 50,000 skills worldwide, works with 20,000 devices and used by 3,500 brands, and maintains a strong market share lead at 62% with over 30 million devices. While its main competitors Google and Apple fall far behind.

Typically, Smart Speakers are used for playing audios, searching information and shopping, which are exactly what Amazon, Google and Apple focus on and each of them has a preference based on their own strength. However, it should and can do more than that. Actually, Smart Speakers are considered as the control center of home automation devices. It builds connections with every smart home equipment so people can use voice to control, as expected, everything like in the house without touching anything.

Although voice isn’t the most efficient way to interact, it’s maybe the most convenient one. It can free your hand and cross the obstacles which touch and light can never do. It has been a long time since humans began to think about using voice to control all devices at home, especially after the showing of the movie Iron Man. People all want to have their own Jarvis and the Smart Speaker is the first step humans take to make it eventually come true.

Currently, Smart Speakers can distinguish voices from different people and other sources and respond to the exact controller by using voice recognition technology. People can use them to buy all kinds of stuffs and order food online. In fact, every one of five Smart Speaker owners ever purchased something using them in U.S. Apart from this, the virtual assistant can even think and learn from the communications they have with human beings. However, sometimes it may not be able to respond or respond incorrectly. While at other time, it may laugh all of a sudden. So it need more time to be a more mature product and finally become perfect, a real artificial intelligence. Besides, the security of them can also be a concerning problem. What if some people hack in the devices and use them to control our life and do some even worse things?

As we said before, the Smart Speaker is supposed to be the control center, so its core function should be connection and control. According to a report, around 31% of Smart Speakers owners use them to control household devices within a week while nearly 80% use them to listen to audios. Therefore, there is great potential in the smart home area and that’s exactly what Amazon is trying to do right now. By opening the API, there are more developers working in this field and the number of devices Alexa works with has a 400% increase this year. With the upcoming 5G communication technology, the Internet of Things will explode soon after. Therefore, there is no doubt that Smart Speaker will have a bright future.