Cell phone pocket calls occur every day, with the first “butt dial” likely happening shortly after the very first person thought it was a good idea to stuff his or her phone into a back pocket and sit.

In past posts, we’ve talked generally about the role of voice in healthcare. This post will be more specific. It will follow the journey of a patient who, at various points, requires information and some level of interaction with people and institutions in her healthcare sphere. This patient is living in the hopefully not-too-distance future when voice assistants play a larger role in...

Recently, Aging 2.0, a global network focused on a collaborative, lifestyle-oriented, opportunity-driven approach to aging, published information on eight areas that present the biggest challenges and opportunities for people to “age in place,” or stay in their homes as they get older.

Previous blog posts have noted that voice is a natural interface for communicating our thoughts and ideas. Recent innovations have made voice an obvious choice for interacting with computers and the internet. For the elderly and people who have dexterity or sight issues, using voice removes a barrier to accessing these staples of everyday life. As you can imagine, these are the same people who...

Say this question to yourself: Why voice? There. In the less than one second it took you to say it, you’ve answered the question. In this blog post, we’ll dig into the question, the answer, and why we believe voice is quickly becoming the new touch -- the next major interface.

Natural language refers to the way we, that is humans, communicate with each other.  Namely, speech and text. For computers, natural language used to be hard because it is messy, full of nuance and context. Only in the last few years has it been possible with deep Learning AI and Natural Language Processing to extract the meaning out of speech or text with high accuracy. Bots and Voice...

Over the last two years we’ve experienced the impact of voice assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home, which are providing a new channel for users to engage with their favorite applications such as the news, weather, sports, Wikipedia, Uber, Spotify, and Fitbit.  The internet of things (IoT) is enabling voice assistance to be embedded in products and is providing an easier way to engage...

The Voice Experience Takes Off

Voice recognition has been around for a long time – since the early 1950’s, when initial systems could recognize spoken numbers – but it’s really only in the past few years, with the advent of voice assistants, that we’ve really seen the power and potential of the voice technology taking off.  And taking off it is, through voice experiences in which humans...

Since Alexa (Amazon’s voice control system) and Echo (Amazon’s first Alexa-driven device) were brought out late in 2014, Amazon introduced a number of different members to the Alexa device family. This can make for some confusion. ZDNet had a recent article that asked the question “Which Alexa is right for you?” that’s aimed at consumers. We thought we’d take things one step further and look...

Amazon’s recent announcement of Echo Show – a touchscreen device with Alexa voice technology built in – got a generally favorable reception, but in that reception I observed two things:

1. The focus on Echo Show’s video calling capabilities (often to the exclusion of all else).
2. The immediate comparisons asking the question, "how is it any different than iPad with Siri?"

In other words, what’s...