A few weeks ago, I did an episode on voice assistants, which are software offerings optimized to parse human language

as it's spoken, or in some cases as it's typed out.

And the primary innovation behind those applications is allowing them to be competent listeners,

and then reaching out into the ether, the internet, or sometimes offerings contained within other apps owned by the voice assistance owners,

and then summoning some relevant information or triggering relevant tasks when asked to do so by the user.

So if I'm using Amazon's Alexa voice assistant, I might speak within range of an echo device's microphones, a request

to set a timer for 20 minutes, and the voice assistant will then confirm that request, set a timer,

and in 20 minutes let me know that the timer has reached zero.

Similarly, if I'm using Apple's Siri voice assistant, I might speak a request within range of my iPhone's microphone

that I'd like to send a text to a friend, and I would speak that text, including each bit of

punctuation, and then say send, and that friend then receives a transcribed text version of the message

I spoke out loud. These are, according to the data we have on such things, fairly useful tools to have on hand.

Voice assistants have yet to become the ad placement paradise, or voice-activated buying stuff

stimulant that many of the companies behind them had hoped for. Few people are using them to buy things on Amazon,

and fewer willing to tolerate an abundance of ads in between starting timers or sending transcribed text messages.

But they are popular for those relatively simple, practical use cases, probably because these use cases allow us to utilize

existing technologies in new ways, which is similar to what smartphones did for existing technologies

that we already had on our laptops and desktop computers.

They're a repackaging of what was already there, which in turn makes existing tools

more useful or just differently useful because of the new context in which those tools can be

leveraged. And because of that new convenience and the intuitive access they enable, it also

makes these tools available to more people, which is also important.

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