Starting from 2011, when Apple integrated Siri on iPhone 4S, voice assistant has appeared on smartphones for almost ten years. With the increasing maturity of voice recognition and AI technology, this feature has been completely popularized in cell phones and extended to smart TVs, smart homes, and other fields, and its future prospects have been infinitely optimistic.

In fact, the functions brought by voice AI technology are no longer limited to simple virtual assistants, and have developed more practical applications such as voice input, voice translation, and so on, and it has infiltrated every aspect of our lives.

When Apple's voice assistant Siri was just launched, it once caused a not-so-small boom. At that time, there were even private developers who created a corresponding Cydia plug-in, so that iOS devices that do not have official support can also use the voice assistant function after jailbreaking.

The voice assistant, which realizes human-computer interaction through voice and has the functionality of a virtual assistant, was a very novel format that instantly aroused the curiosity of many users.

Apple started the process, and other tech vendors have also been pushing voice assistants, and in 2011, Google added voice search to the Chrome search engine to meet the needs of a wide range of users with voice input.

In 2013, Microsoft's voice assistant, Cortana, was launched on Windows Phone. Cortana demonstrates Microsoft's technological advantages in the field of voice recognition accumulated over the years. The effect of the fake to mess with the real effect, and immediately have a countless number of fans.

At the same time, domestic voice AI companies are actively launching similar products. For example, Tech Data Xunfei has launched a voice assistant app, and it is also a partner of domestic cell phone manufacturers such as Meizu and OPPO, and many users are using Tech Data Xunfei's voice recognition technology for their voice assistants or intelligent assistants on their phones.

However, while voice assistants are rapidly gaining popularity and maturity on cell phones, the enthusiasm for them seems to be slowly receding. In my personal experience, it's very rare to see someone using their phone's voice assistant feature in public, even though more and more vendors are dramatically prioritizing voice assistants, such as adding separate AI physical buttons and placing AI voice assistant switches in prominent positions on the desktop.

Many people, including myself, don't like to use voice assistants for reasons that are either bad or inconvenient. Now the mainstream voice assistant's voice recognition ability is generally stronger, but there will still be a cartwheeling situation, especially when the environment is noisy, voice semantics ambiguous (or perhaps the Mandarin pronunciation is not allowed) in the case. Often times, it's easier to just do it manually than to call out to a voice assistant for help.

The inconvenience is well understood. To use a voice assistant in public, you have to get over the shame of talking to your phone in public on the one hand, and on the other hand, you probably have to be considerate of not exposing your privacy.

Nowadays, smartphones are quite popular, and we're so skilled at operating them that we don't really need to use voice as a form of interaction to realize various functions. In this case, the voice feature on the phone does sometimes feel like a bit of a downer.

Speech makes a big splash in IoT

Speech AI technology didn't stop at smartphones, but expanded to other products. Now, no matter whether it is a smart speaker, or smart TV, and all kinds of endless smart hardware products, as long as the title is "smart", there is no lack of voice control function.

Interestingly, in the home environment, the advantages of voice AI technology seem to be more fully released. The willingness to use voice interaction is greatly enhanced in more private scenarios. In a relatively closed environment, users don't have to worry about privacy, their psychological defenses are lowered, and the likelihood that they will naturally try voice interaction increases.

For products like TV speakers, the traditional control tools are physical buttons or remote controls. In contrast, the advantage of voice is that it frees the user's hands. In the home environment, the user can't do housework and other scenarios, directly using voice commands to realize the audio and video playback, home control and other functions, undoubtedly greatly improving the efficiency, the use of experience is further.

In recent years, regardless of the wisdom of the screen or part of the brand's high-end TV, have enhanced the large-screen device pickup effect, through the addition of the radio microphone and other ways, so that users can wake up at any time, anywhere, as a smart control center of the TV device. It is now widely believed in the industry that the future popularization of 5G, large broadband, and the further development of AI technology will bring us into an era of the Internet of Everything.

When all the appliances and devices we have access to are connected to the Internet and have smart features, how to conveniently manipulate them will become the most critical issue. For now, voice is the least expensive and most convenient way to interact.

5G, AI, IoT, Internet of Everything ...... about the future, a little ambitious technology vendors do not want to miss, Apple, Google, Xiaomi and other companies, continue to strengthen the voice AI technology in the cell phone system of the presence of a large part of the layout in advance, and continue to cultivate the habits of the user, so that the target group in the unconsciously, into the ecosystem established by the manufacturer.

For a specific group of people, voice is a revolutionary technology

In addition, it is undeniable that for some specific groups of people, voice AI-related technology plays a pivotal role in promoting the mobile Internet and intelligent life.

For many "senior" users, typing on a cell phone with a virtual keyboard is too expensive and difficult to learn. Because of this, many elders chatting on WeChat really like to send long segments of voice messages, which makes a lot of people so annoyed that they want WeChat to cut out the voice function.

But now, social apps like WeChat, as well as some third-party input methods, already support voice input functionality, which allows you to turn your voice into text. With the current level of technology, the recognition accuracy and usability of mainstream voice input is already quite high. For small-screen devices like smartwatches, voice control is often much more convenient than touch control.

In addition, for some visually impaired people, the development of voice AI technology has largely lowered the threshold for them to use smart devices and enjoy mobile internet life. We have previously tested some mainstream apps in our daily lives, and through voice and physical button interactions, the blind community has been able to complete a lot of operations and use quite a few features more easily.

Whether you like it or not, the evolution of Internet technology in recent years has been a constant encroachment on user privacy. Even Apple, which has always boasted of respecting user privacy, was exposed to privacy issues in 2019, with Siri uploading user voice data that could be accessed and analyzed manually.

The balance between privacy and technology is also a challenge for companies developing voice AI. In theory, to make the voice function more usable and intelligent, it is inevitable that the user's voice data needs to be analyzed and optimized. And the key question is, how likely is it that this collected information will be leaked and illegally utilized.

Last year, the consulting firm Accenture conducted a survey of Chinese users. The data showed that Chinese users were 97% satisfied with voice assistants, but trust was still low. The top concerns Chinese users have about voice assistants are security concerns, user needs not being understood, and privacy, respectively.

And, after negative things like webcam theft and room opening data being sold, domestic consumers are no less wary of privacy issues.

In 2018, the EU passed GDPR, the toughest personal data protection regulation in history, which makes it clear that users have absolute control over their personal data, and the penalties for corporate violations are extremely heavy, with a minimum fine of 100 billion euros.

From a user's perspective, this may be good to curb corporate misuse of user data and violations of privacy. But too strict a restriction could also make it more difficult for tech companies to push forward with advances in technology that require the use of big data, such as voice AI.

If we look at the longer term, we believe that the importance of voice in human-computer interaction will increase dramatically in the future, and in smart home scenarios, it will even become the primary mode of operation. But in this process, we hope that our own personal data can also be more properly handled.