The "voice assistant space" also includes Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana, so it's not going anywhere.
I'd contend that it's absolutely not a solution in search of a problem; it's much more of an unsolved problem, and a big part of the "why" is
- voice recognition/assistance tech still maturing
- major players are insisting that the tech supports their walled gardens
- price points are still a problem
The last two creates a conundrum: a lot of times tech prices come down by selling expensive stuff to rich people until the hardware becomes commoditized. But for a good voice assistant, you need a lot of up-front investment at scale. Unfortunately, the companies that are able to do this are also controlling the hardware that can use it, which limits its ability to spread and be useful.
This is why I think Mycroft is important to support:
1. If you can make voice assistant software open-source and plug-and-play, then it frees people up to tinker with form factors
2. Part of Mycroft's pitch to businesses is that they can make custom solutions. There are probably a thousand big businesses that might want to get into this space but don't want to rely on Amazon because they want to control the experience and not give up their data. Maybe Target wants to stick virtual assistants around their stores, or maybe a hospital wants to give tools for surgeons.
I also think there's an opportunity for voice control in home stereo, where someone decouples the speakers from everything else. It's still annoying to work with Bluetooth in 2022, and Sonos is still pricey, and another walled garden. I'd love to have a simple controller that connects a dumb speaker to Wi-Fi and lets me voice-control it to play music from a library of my choosing. That's not a thing yet, right?
> 1. If you can make voice assistant software open-source and plug-and-play, then it frees people up to tinker with form factors
For what it's worth, Google Assistant does have an open API to create new devices. It's not open source, but you can certainly experiment with your own custom form factors. There's even a tutorial:
Really? An Echo Dot is $25 on Amazon right now. Which, if you use it at all, is pretty reasonable. (To be sure, if I were using it for music to any degree, I'd probably get a model with better speakers.)
For music, I have an old phone connected to a stereo receiver. So it has voice control although I mostly pick a playlist or album manually.
That's a pretty weak orbit though if that's all I'm using it for. (I do use mine for music sometimes but it's actually connected to Apple Music.) I could switch to a different assistant tomorrow if I wanted to. I've literally never ordered anything by voice--and can't really see doing so.
I'd contend that it's absolutely not a solution in search of a problem; it's much more of an unsolved problem, and a big part of the "why" is
- voice recognition/assistance tech still maturing
- major players are insisting that the tech supports their walled gardens
- price points are still a problem
The last two creates a conundrum: a lot of times tech prices come down by selling expensive stuff to rich people until the hardware becomes commoditized. But for a good voice assistant, you need a lot of up-front investment at scale. Unfortunately, the companies that are able to do this are also controlling the hardware that can use it, which limits its ability to spread and be useful.
This is why I think Mycroft is important to support:
1. If you can make voice assistant software open-source and plug-and-play, then it frees people up to tinker with form factors
2. Part of Mycroft's pitch to businesses is that they can make custom solutions. There are probably a thousand big businesses that might want to get into this space but don't want to rely on Amazon because they want to control the experience and not give up their data. Maybe Target wants to stick virtual assistants around their stores, or maybe a hospital wants to give tools for surgeons.
I also think there's an opportunity for voice control in home stereo, where someone decouples the speakers from everything else. It's still annoying to work with Bluetooth in 2022, and Sonos is still pricey, and another walled garden. I'd love to have a simple controller that connects a dumb speaker to Wi-Fi and lets me voice-control it to play music from a library of my choosing. That's not a thing yet, right?