Smart speakers: the next generation

Things have changed in the smart speaker world – and not just on the outside

When you think about, it is quite amazing how quickly smart speakers have become so completely normalised. Speech recognition has been around in some limited form since the 1960s when IBM built the Shoebox, capable of recognising a then-astonishing 16 words and numbers. In the mid-1990s, Dragon Dictate introduced reasonable (though sometimes comically imprecise) speech recognition on the desktop as long as you were willing to invest around twice the price of a computer to pick up V1 of its software. You could argue that it was Apple that brought voice tech to the masses with Siri, though Siri actually started development in 1993; Siri Inc was snaffled up by the Cupertino giant in 2010, and hit the iPhone in 2011.

But to look at any company other than Amazon as the cause of the spectacular growth of smart speakers would be to look in completely the wrong direction. Alexa, first introduced with the Amazon Echo exclusively for Amazon Prime members in 2014, beat Microsoft’s Cortana to the market and came two years before the Google Assistant. That first Echo caught a huge amount of press and public attention: here was something brand new in the tech field. A self-contained AI brain, squashed into a speaker that wasn’t too shabby at pushing out a tune. Amazon expanded its capabilities with Alexa Skills, it released a friendly API with terms of use acceptable enough that all and sundry began build compatible smart devices. It made the voice assistant a thing.

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