Voice-commanded virtual assistants packed into speakers and other devices are to be a “game-changing” trend this year, Consumer Electronics Show (CES) researchers said on Sunday.
Sales of “smart” speakers are expected to nearly double in the US, to US$3.8 billion, from last year, according to Lesley Rohrbaugh and Steve Koenig, researchers with the Consumer Technology Association, which organizes the annual CES trade event.
“That market is not just heating up, it is a wildfire,” Koenig said, while discussing industry trends expected to play out at CES and globally in the coming year.
“Compatibility with digital assistants has become table stakes [in the consumer electronics industry],” Koenig said.
Being able to order items, select music, get information, and more by speaking to digital assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, the Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana has been such a hit that pressure will be on for more ways to interact with machines using voice, the researchers said.
At the same time, artificial intelligence will improve, with machines getting better at thinking like people, anticipating desires, and holding conversations instead of simply taking orders, Rohrbaugh said.
The CES show floor was expected to be rife with appliances, televisions, vehicles, speakers, robots and more augmented with virtual assistant software such as Alexa, Cortana, the Google Assistant or Samsung’s Bixby.
“We will truly be able to converse with our AI [artificial intelligence] devices,” Rohrbaugh said, while envisioning where ‘smart’ speaker technology was heading.
“AI is going to know you and you will be able to trust the device,” Rohrbaugh said.
Behind the scenes, telecommunications service providers around the world are to roll out fifth-generation, or 5G, networks capable of moving seemingly limitless amounts of data blazingly fast, the researchers said.
Such 5G networks will be critical to enabling machines such as self-driving cars to process sensor data quickly enough to make real time decisions, they said.
“Clearly, we don’t want self-driving vehicles to hesitate for even a millisecond, so we are going to need 5G,” Koenig said.
Those higher speeds would also be necessary to “make virtual reality really wireless,” handle data used to manage “smart” cities, power augmented reality, and even to channel the flood of high-definition video streamed online, the researchers said.
“5G and AI are heralds for the coming data age,” Koenig said.
Spending on consumer electronics devices and streaming services in the US alone was expected to climb slightly more than 3 percent this year to US$351 billion, with the number of “connected” devices in the country rising to 715 million from 671 million last year.
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