RAIN’s Voice Predictions
I love predictions — making them, reading them, and checking them. I especially like one’s around technology, which is why I’m a Ray Kurzweil fan.
RAIN Agency, an agency that does a lot of work around Alexa Skills, came out last week with it’s predictions for 2019. It’s worth taking a few minutes to read. To add some credence, RAIN was behind one of the first Alexa Skills that was promoted by Amazon for Campbell Soup and also came out with the Reverb App, an AVS integration for smart phones. I felt a twinge of competition from them as we had put out a similar app, the Ubi App, back in 2016.
A few things I completely agree with in their predictions:
- Speech synthesis will become so good this year, it’ll be hard to tell what’s real and we’ll need tools to help verify this.
- Assistants will take into consideration our emotional state and vitals in formulating a response
- Multimodal interaction will be a thing
Things I’m iffier on:
- I’m not as hopeful about a Siri “leapfrog”. Change my mind, Apple.
- Addictive Skills that don’t have a visual element aren’t that likely. I think the native of voice and its naturalness is that it’s non-habitforming
- Giving voters a voice… I don’t think this is an option until Skill makers can get audio back from the Skills
