In this episode, Teri welcomes Brian Jackson, editorial director of IT World Canada, to talk about the voice trends of digital assistants in Canada and the latest news that came out of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2018.

Welcome Brian Jackson!

Brian Jackson has been around technology for a long time, starting as a writer for IT World Canada approximately 10 years ago. He now is the editorial director for the publication. I was really excited to have him as a guest to hear about his perspective of the voice trends in Canada. He also just returned from CES 2018 and we talked about the presence of voice technologies at the Show.

3 Voice Trends

In this episode, Brian talks about 3 of his voice trend predictions for Canada:

  1. He believes that we will see a rapid pace of adoption for smart speaker devices. In fact, he believes that adoption will be so swift, it will be higher than any smartphone adoption numbers we’ve ever seen. The IDC predicts that standalone intelligent assistants will find a home in 1 million Canadian households by the end of 2018.
  2. Brian also believes that AI assistants will become the most-embedded service on connected devices since Wi-Fi itself. AI assistants are going to be in just about everything you can think of – speakers, headphones, cars, etc.
  3. Brian predicts that most third-party services developed for AI assistants will see poor engagement, while built-in commands will continue to see higher rates of use.

Brian believes that voice is the future of computer interfaces because voice eliminates another layer of abstraction. You no longer need to use tools to interact with a device; you just simply conjure up an idea and verbalize what you are thinking. This is the most natural way to interact with a digital device.

CES 2018

Brian also just returned from CES 2018 in Las Vegas, and according to him, Voice AIs were everywhere. The competition between Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant is ON! Google had even ad-wrapped the entire monorail!

Voice assistants were seen in all types of consumer products, in three major categories: smart home gadgets, wearables, and cars.

There were lots of announcements about the growth of these assistant in the future, with Amazon having the goal to have “Alexa everywhere!”

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

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