The Economist explains

Why tech companies are trying to become your personal assistant

By A.E.S.

UNTIL recently, personal assistants were a luxury available only to successful executives and those wealthy enough to pay another human being to organise their lives. That could change, if technology firms have their way. Recently Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have been investing heavily in developing software that can replicate some of the functions of personal assistants, such as booking restaurant reservations, keeping tabs on the traffic and weather and offering alerts for upcoming meetings. Last week Apple announced it is bringing its virtual-assistant software, Siri, to the television set. Why are tech firms battling so fiercely with one another to offer virtual personal assistants?

With the rise of smartphones, companies are able to burrow deeper into consumers’ lives than ever before. Developing useful software can differentiate firms in the minds of customers and enhance loyalty to their platforms. For example, rivals Apple, Google and Microsoft all have different smartphone offerings, and also offer differentiated personal assistants, in Siri, Google Now and Cortana, respectively. Amazon has a standalone device that looks like a speaker, called Echo, which can do several things, including reading audiobooks and reordering items through Amazon. Smart assistants can also extract new information about users, which will be helpful to driving future revenues. With their software, firms learn about what people search for, where they go and other details. Recently Facebook launched “M”, a personal concierge offering in its Messaging app, which can help buy and organise things on users’ behalf, giving it insights into people’s commercial transactions that Facebook would otherwise not have.

These services are bound to become more common. According to Gartner, around 38% of American consumers have used virtual-assistant services on their smartphones recently, and by the end of 2016 an estimated two-thirds of consumers in developed markets will use them daily. Virtual assistants represent a new wave of “search”, whereby people looking for information do not have to write what they are looking for into a search box and scroll through results. Instead, they can bark commands at their phones or other devices and be presented with a single answer. In theory this gives rival firms a shot at undermining some of Google’s core business; they will go less frequently to websites that specialise in online search.

For smart assistants to really prove their worth and one day displace human secretaries, they have to get better at their job. Every service still struggles with voice-recognition. Google Now misses around 8% of words, though that marks a big improvement over the quarter of words it failed to comprehend in 2012. Virtual assistants also cannot fulfill complex requests yet. Someone asking their smartphone assistant to book them a flight will receive a page of search results, not an e-mail confirming the ticket has been booked. To improve further, personal assistants will need to get to know their users’ habits and preferences better. That happens to be exactly what they are after.

Dig deeper:
Virtual personal assistants will have big effects on privacy and commerce (September 2015)
Lip reading may be the key to better voice-recognition software (March 2015)

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