The future of voice: a timeline

In this posting from the LinkedIn Agency Influencer program, MediaCom's Alex Kirk sounds off about the future of speech-activated gadgets in this handy diagram

With all the voice gadgets and apps on the market, I started looking into predictions – I was actually pretty surprised at just how bullish the predictions are.

I’ve done a video on this, too, but I thought I’d pull together a single graphic for it since it’s really quite an ask to get someone to sit through a few minutes of me blathering on just to get to the numbers. Just click the image below to enlarge it. 

What I’ve done is summarise all the predictions I can find that have fixed dates on them, taken from reports and analysis from consultancies like GMI Insight or Accenture, device or software manufacturers like Google, or as reported by sites like Business Insider.

For me, the most significant number in there is just how many home appliances are predicted to be enabled with voice or virtual assistant tech by 2020 – 700 million of the things.

It’s got the whiff of science fiction about it, but given the headlines of recent weeks and months, the notion that there’ll almost a billion new devices, connected to the internet with a new user interface, just screams “potential hack target” at me, in the worst possible way.

There’s some fun stuff in there though.

(Some browsers don’t deal with images very well, so there’s a high-res image here if you need it.)

Alex Kirk is head of systems and automation at MediaCom

This article is part of the LinkedIn Agency Influencer program. See more from the program by clicking on the banner below.

 

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