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Earlier this week, we learned that global sales of smart speakers are expected to grow sixfold over the next two years. This reflects many studies according to which the majority of US households will have a smart speaker by 2022, powered by the current smart assistants Google Assistant and Alexa.
At the same time, tech giants making smart assistants seem to want to have ways, selling products to consumers and governments. For example, Microsoft, maker of Cortana, may be providing facial recognition software to ICE, the government agency responsible for illegally capturing and detaining immigrants in the United States
. Look, the company has attracted the attention of employees, the ACLU, and a number of other organizations to stop sharing its facial recognition software with law enforcement agencies . This is in addition to the incident of May, still unexplained, in which an Echo speaker sent an unauthorized voice recording of an Oregon woman's conversation to a person on his contact list.
Eating in the market share of the Amazon Echo series, Google worked with the military to improve the targeting capabilities of drones.
As conversational computing becomes more widely available, assistants offering a different view of the emerging future,
that's why startups like Snips, which brings its own smart speaker on the market, focus their attention on a primary differentiator: privacy
"My goal is to destroy Alexa by providing a platform that is exactly the opposite, that people will love to build," said Rand Hindi CEO at VentureBeat in a phone interview. "If you really want to distinguish yourself from Alexa or Google, you have to do something radically different. My job is not to catch Alexa. My job is to offer something so different that people do not even compare – that's my goal. "
Fears of surveillance can curb the demand of smart speakers
The problem with Google Assistant and Alexa, says Hindi, is that by centralizing so much personal data and running in the cloud, they become more and more targets. most sought after for mass surveillance or hacking.
At the same time as smart speakers are becoming the most popular element of consumer electronics, more prone to espionage d & # 39; Corporate or Big Brother scenarios.Therefore, they might be vulnerable to the competition of an alternative product that, instead of recording everything you say and send it to the cloud or to a person in your contact list without your consent, will protect your privacy.
We can not start having AI all around us in our living room if we are constantly under constant surveillance "said Hindi.
Regardless of whether the conspiracy theories of intelligent speakers are true, they have an effect. A PricewaterhouseCooper survey released in April found that lack of confidence in AI assistant manufacturers could become a barrier to adoption by consumers.
Of the US residents surveyed as part of the study, 18% said they did not own a smart speaker or device with a smart assistant, with more than half saying that it's for confidentiality reasons. The report did not specify exactly what people feared for their personal information, but it's easy to imagine what companies as big as Google or Amazon could do, given that their monopolies were based on the monetization of personal data. users. 19659002] "I think the greatest value of privacy and voice assistants will be to facilitate adoption.I think this is going to be the major differentiator," Hindi said.
Selling Confidentiality as a Characteristic
Hindi wants the decentralization of assistants to become the norm, and smart speakers take the same form as e-mail applications. End-to-end encryption and heightened concern about privacy have led to the popularity of services like WhatsApp and Telegram Messenger.
Snips stands as a decentralized assistant, who performs machine learning without shared data in the cloud.
Last month, Snips launched Air Snips, a smart speaker with an assistant inside to do a lot of things that others do, like checking his schedule, playing the music and control his devices. Smaller devices with microphones inside can be placed on the walls or even worn on you to extend voice control throughout the home, not just in the speaker's area within earshot [19659002] continue to develop its platform and attract developers. More than 14,000 developers have used the Snips product series, ranging from a platform for creating wizards to Snips' natural language reference data set, through a kit software development to place his assistant in a range of hardware. with Mycroft, an open source, independent and privacy-focused assistant. The Mycroft Mark II smart speaker, which looks a little like a giant pill with screen, became available earlier this year.
Still in the assistant alternative space, SoundHound raised $ 100 million from strategic investors, including Daimler AG and Hyundai. 19659002] In the car, where Google pushes Assistant in Android Auto and Amazon installs Alexa in Toyota and Ford cars, SoundHound presents its assistant platform and Hound as an alternative that allows brands to deploy AI AI conversation without the need for say "Alexa" or "OK, Google."
"Any business that has a product and a successful brand does not want it, they do not want their user and brand to be diverted by these companies." Our platform allows our partners to incorporate better technology, maintain their brand and users, differentiate themselves and innovate, "said Keyvan Mohajer, CEO of SoundHound, in an interview with VentureBeat
Just like other recognizable IA aids, alternatives like SoundHound and Snips compete for their wizards to be available in a wide range of devices found at home or at home. vail.
Consolidation by acquisition
Companies like Snips and Mycroft try to seduce More consumers and brands are viable alternatives to Alexa, large high-tech companies create start-ups to give a boost to their assistants.
Facebook reportedly bought Bloomsbury last week in London. on its acquisition for an undisclosed amount, also supported independence as part of its main appeal.
In May, Microsoft acquired Semantic Machine's to make its conversational AI services like Cortana smarter and attract more researchers to the San Francisco area.
And shortly before launching its Actions on Google platform for voice applications, Google acquired Dialogflow, Api.ai.
The Future of Voice Applications
It's not clear if Mycroft and Snips are going the way of other startups and are being eaten by bigger fish in the conversational AI pond but the choice that they offer is intriguing. ] The option of a decentralized assistant, said Hindi, where users are assured that their data will not be shared, makes possible a different kind of thinking about what a home assistant and the voice applications that it provides can or should do
Privacy also leaves the door open for next-generation wizards who not only listen to a waking word, but listen proactively with microphones or watch with cameras. There are already home security systems that can tell you when your dog is on the couch, but future systems can interpret your mood and change lighting, detect if an older person has fallen and ask for it. 39; aid.
Giving people personal health care data, for example, in an environment where they do not have to worry about being monetized, hacked or exposed outside their home. home, could lead to the creation of some unique and powerful applications. But privacy must be addressed before these use cases can be considered a possibility, Hindi said.
"I think that the use of voice will increase with the adoption of the voice [computing] and for that to happen, not to worry about privacy", has said Hindi. "And that does not mean that they're waiting for a privacy helper to design a specific problem." I think it's just that the mentality is that privacy is important to express, and that the only way that A billion people will have a voice assistant is actually if these voice assistants guarantee privacy.I think so before we can start seeing new truly intelligent innovative use cases, we must d & # 39; first fix this friction to the adoption that privacy is currently. "
After enough attempts to quell the privacy concerns of consumers, some use the tech giants to launch new features for their assistants all the few weeks, partly to feed the perception that the speakers become smarter, but they could choose to avoid cutting -cours, use cases innovative. After the espionage charges, conspiracy theories and congressional letters, Google and Amazon may decide to focus on commodity returns like shopping, research and the respective smart home companies Nest and Ring
access their own data, assistants could become more personal, not the opposite. This could make room in the voice ecosystem for companies that come forward as anti-Alexa.
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