| 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? |
Especially interesting as voice recognition is much easier, cheaper and more efficient within the limited space of a specific usage.