For years we’ve been promised a computing future where our commands aren’t tapped, typed, or swiped, but spoken. Embedded in this promise is, of course, convenience; voice computing will not only be hands-free, but totally helpful and rarely ineffective.
That hasn’t quite panned out. The usage of voice assistants has gone up in recent years as more smartphone and smart home customers opt into (or in some cases, accidentally “wake up”) the AI living in their devices. But ask most people what they use these assistants for, and the voice-controlled future sounds almost primitive, filled with weather reports and dinner timers. We were promised boundless intelligence; we got “Baby Shark” on repeat.
Google now says we’re on the cusp of a new era in voice computing, due to a combination of advancements in natural language processing and in chips designed to handle AI tasks. During its…
