So Google wants me to start saying “Hey Gemini” now, huh? No thanks, you can go overboard with this nonsense. I don’t have it. Call me a Luddite, call me a curmudgeon, tell me to move with the times; I don’t care, I’m not going to talk to my tech.
Now, before we get into the meat of this article, I’d like to preface it by saying that I’m not against the existence of voice control features as a whole. This is actually an extremely vital accessibility feature that many tech users with disabilities rely on to get the most out of their hardware. But for those who don’t actually do it need like me – what’s wrong with just pressing some buttons or tapping on a touch screen?
I get annoyed if someone talks too loudly on the phone on public transport. When tech companies like Google tell me that voice control is the future of how we interact with our technology, I am immediately horrified at the thought of traveling to a city where everyone constantly barking commands at their phones and tablets.
How many people actually use voice commands?
I did some research into the actual statistics behind using voice command and was surprised by the results. I have I literally never saw a single person. use your phone to search for something on the web using a voice command; Of course, I’ve seen people ask their Alexa Smart Speaker listen to music or turn off a light, which I’ll probably never do either because I always have a phone in my pocket that can do those things, but web searches? Really?
Apparently yes: according to a study carried out in 2018 by PWC32% of voice assistant users ask the digital assistant they have chosen at least one thing they would normally use a search engine for daily, and 89% do so at least once a month. Of course, this only concerns people who Already use a voice assistant, but the analysis of Statist claims that nearly half of Americans talk on their phones or smart speakers at least semi-regularly (although that figure is reduced to about 1 in 5 globally).
The fact is that as I delved deeper into these statistics, I became less and less convinced. For starters, the very first set of statistics I came across (which I won’t link to here) claimed that “an estimated 8.4 billion people worldwide use voice assistants” – that’s… more than the current total human population. I started noticing more gaps in the data and having to abandon some sources due to a clear bias towards tech marketing.
More confused than enlightened, I ultimately had to conclude that much of the statistical research in this area of technology relied more on product sales than on real, unbiased surveys of the population: and that’s a serious flaw, because a person who owns one piece of voice-activated equipment will probably own more. I have a friend who has three identical ones. Echo point smart speakers placed in different rooms in her house and she uses Siri on her iPhone to make music requests while she’s in the car. Me? I just have a driving playlist that I mix before I start the engine.
Voice control is improving – slowly
I admit that my usual excuse for why I abhor voice-activated technology doesn’t carry as much weight as it used to. This excuse was, in short: it’s shit. The early days of Siri, Cortana and their ilk were marked by a constant refrain of “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite understand that”, but with the dawn of AI, things are starting to improve.
Tools like Apple Intelligence And Google Gemini offer multimodal input, allowing them to understand voice requests as well as text prompts. Today’s large language model AIs do a much better job of analyzing spoken words than older speech recognition software, and are even able to adapt to an individual user’s speech patterns over time. time to provide more precise answers.
However, there are still obstacles to overcome. Although speech recognition generally supports multiple languages, it often struggles with strong accents and speech impediments (I have a lisp myself, which doesn’t help matters). This may be due to unnoticed biases in the training data used: if a US company uses recordings of Americans speaking English to train its speech recognition AI to understand spoken English, it will unsurprisingly have difficulty when it will hear a Japanese or a Swede speaking this language. .
I sincerely hope that one day voice commands will work perfectly, because the people who really need them deserve a service that works as well as simply typing a query into Google. But I won’t use it, and I don’t want to live in a future where everyone is – you can be sure I’ll be the first to attack any tech company that tries to make voice commands the default mode of interacting with their product.
