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 the top three activities at the start of the day. And games, messaging, and children’s stories are the top activities in the early evening.

The report suggests that smart speaker usage goes up over time, too, with 51 percent of respondents claiming that these use their speaker more often over time. (33 percent said their usage was about the same.)

Smart speaker usage also impacts other digital devices. 44 percent of respondents to the survey say they are using their phone-based assistants more often now. 64 percent want an assistant in their cars. 31 percent are using smart home devices. And 38 percent want more smart speakers for their homes.

One thing I really like about these devices is that they often lead to more engagement with other people you’re with. This is in sharp contrast to the typical American evening in which people stare blankly at televisions or have their faces buried in some device screen. But fully 66 percent of smart speaker owners use the devices to entertain family and friends, with music (60 percent), answers to questions (30 percent), weather (28 percent), jokes, and more.

So the fact that the living room is the number one location (52 percent) for a smart speaker maybe shouldn’t surprise me. The kitchen, with 21 percent, is number two. (And sure enough, those locations are where our first two smart speakers went. That said, the kitchen was first in my own house.)

The trick for ambient computing, and thus for smart speakers in the short term, is in becoming more sophisticated while remaining easy to use. That these devices can be conversational is key. It can’t just be isolated questions and answers or commands and actions.

Today, I can construct fairly complex commands like “Hey Google, Play The Beatles from Google Play Music on the Sun room speakers” to get exactly what I want. But as this technology gets more sophisticated, it should be easier to get what I want. For example, a set of speakers around the home could collectively understand that I may want to play music in the room in which I am standing. And I can already configure my default music player. So “Hey Google, Play the Beatles here” should work just fine. Also, “Hey Google” needs to go away.

But the next major step is what Google calls routines. These are basically scripts, similar to what we see with IFTTT, that combine multiple tasks into singular commands. “Hey Google, goodnight,” could trigger any number of actions, for example: Most lights would turn off, some ambient lights would remain on, the alarm would be set, the doors would lock, the shades would go down, and so on.

These are the advances I expect to see throughout 2018, with Google pulling ever-closer to (and then surpassing) Amazon, with both ecosystems solidifying their dominant positions. I also expect to see ambient computing happen much more quickly than previous personal technology waves. If you look back to the PC, the Internet, and then mobile and cloud computing, you will see one major trend: Each wave happened much more quickly than that of its predecessor. That will be true with ambient computing too.

But no matter how it does happen, or how long it takes, there is no denying ambient computing. This is the next wave. And it is happening right now.