Whose voice will control the future?

We are increasingly accessing the Internet through our voices… It’s estimated that at the beginning of 2017, 4% of US households had an active Amazon Alexa¹. Apple’s Siri interpreted 2,000,000,000 voice commands a week, and 20% of US Google Android searches are conducted by voice. In India, millions of smartphone users navigate the Internet with their voice daily². These statistics demonstrate how the desktop and mobile Internet are crossfading into the Internet of Things (IoT). Physical, connected devices are increasingly providing smart speakers and microphones that are “always on” and recording constantly. The amount of data now going in and out of our homes, as well as every other place with a connected device, is in the zettabytes³. Each time we speak to a voice interface, the recording is sent to a server and analysed by code to extract the meaning from a statement and provide a response. This software is known as Artificial Intelligence (AI), the ability of digital computers and programmed machines to complete tasks associated with human intelligence⁴.

Beyond privacy and security concerns⁵, the major voice assistants today may not speak your language or understand your accent, as notoriously captured in this Apple Scotland parody⁶. Amazon, Google, Apple and Samsung are aggressively shaping the agenda for the future of voice. They are doing this with vast cash reserves at a scale not seen since the industrial revolution where empires were built. Amazon’s $100million Alexa fund to “fuel voice technology innovation” demonstrates the size of the power that they have⁷.

In recent years, user generated social media platforms have contributed to a shift from a mainly typographic culture of knowledge creation and enquiry to an image sharing culture of instant gratification⁸. This, combined with technologies designed to reward habit-forming behaviour have lead some people to speculate that as a civilisation we are becoming more impulsive and emotional and less rational⁹. What impact will the next shift in the Internet have on our society?

We still have a long way to go before everyone can safely and securely access the voice-enabled Internet in their language and on their terms. Mozilla’s Common Voice project¹⁰ is one initiative to create an open source repository of voice data in multiple languages and dialects that anyone can contribute to and use to design and build new concepts.

In this interdisciplinary project sponsored by Mozilla’s Open IoT Studio¹¹ we challenge you all to contribute to a future where voice-enabled internet services are diverse, trusted, inclusive and healthy. Whose voice will control the future?

Footnote Links: