Today’s Smart Speakers Point to Our Ambient Computing Future (Premium)

Ambient computing is the next major wave of personal computing, and smart speakers are how we get there.

A widely-quoted report from NPR and Edison Research claims that the 2017 holiday selling season saw a significant rise in smart speaker ownership. This leap forward is tied, no doubt, to the commoditization of these devices, with both Amazon and Google selling their cheapest offerings for just $29. At those prices, a smart speaker is an impulse buy, the sort of thing one might get as a stocking-stuffer.

Here are the base numbers from the report: Smart speaker sales rose 128 percent in the United States during the 2017 holiday season, year over year. And 16 percent of US homes now own a smart speaker. That's an audience of about 39 million people. Almost all of those speakers are Amazon (11 percent) or Google devices (4 percent), as you'd expect. (But that will change over time, and I think the metric we'll need to examine going forward is which assistant is used in any given device.)

I'm interested in two things here. What people are using the speakers for now. And where this is headed.

I feel like the long-term future is secure: We will see an acceleration of voice-activated capabilities in devices of all kinds. This is how we get to true ambient computing. That it will start first in the home makes sense, since that is the ideal test bed for differentiating between a discrete set of different voices. But thanks to the inclusion of digital personal assistant technology in phones, these capabilities will spread from the home out into the world, first to workplaces and then, ultimately, to public spaces.

Short-term is perhaps more interesting, in part because I know that some people---let's call them "ambient computing deniers"---don't see the value of this technology. Or, are simply worried about the privacy implications.

But I think we need to view the adoption of this technology in the same way that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs tried to justify the existence of the iPad. That is, it can't just be another way of doing tasks we already do with existing devices. Ambient computing needs to offer better and more convenient ways to do tasks. If the capabilities are good enough, it will take off.

Obviously, the capabilities are good enough, even at this early stage. NPR/Edison claims that 39 percent of smart speaker users have replaced a traditional AM/FM radio. And 30 percent are using it instead of a television.

In both cases, I assume the radio or TV was something that was just on while the user went about whatever daily tasks---making dinner, cleaning up, and so on---and that this replacement wasn't 1:1. That is, the nice thing about a smart speaker is that it can do more than just provide background noise. You can ask it questions, or to do other things. And it can proactively alert you to events that are personal or public.

Usage varies over time, which makes sense. For example, traffic, weather, and news are ...