The Future of Voice Control

Every year the big tech companies put on a conference to showcase their new services and products.  Last week Google had theirs called Google 1/0 2018.  One of the key themes throughout the conference was artificial intelligence mainly through the Google Assistant feature.  The highlight was the demonstration of Duplex which created an appointment for the user at a certain day and time.

Right now voice control is still quite finicky. It doesn’t respond well in noisy rooms, it will respond to other people, you have to phrase commands in a specific fashion, etc.  And that is just the technology part it.  When you add in the psychological part of talking to a device, most of us tend not to use very often.  Right now, the voice control portion of my Intermediate Smartphones and Tablets class is short and mostly for fun.

One of my class mantras is that my students aren’t guinea pigs.  You want things that work and work well.  And in five years, this is going to be what works well for both Apple and Android devices.  (Google may have done it first, but Apple will catch up.)  However for it to work well, a user must use many of the features that already exist on the phone.  The video shows an appointment made and then added to the calendar. If you use a paper calendar rather than the calendar on your phone, the feature isn’t very useful.  The features you are learning now will be even more beneficial to you in the future.