Guest article written by Brendon Reid of Automation Associates

The once gimmicky voice control is making technological leaps and bounds and global purchases of voice control devices grew by close to 30% in 2019 due partly in response to COVID-19 as a way to avoid contact with high-touch surfaces such as smartphones, TV remotes, light switches and thermostats.  Lower touch of keypads through voice control has positive health benefits in both residential, commercial and public applications.

As more computing power and better back-end AI is available to voice control products we are spending less time swearing at Siri as she gets better at delivering what we want the first time.  Siri is now at a point where she is more useful than annoying and can send a text message in less time than it takes to unlock your phone, find the recipient and type your message.  Super handy if you need two hands on the steering wheel at the time.

Give it a go now – say “hey Siri, send an email to alex at aa dot net dot nz” make the subject voice control and let me know if it works for you.

There is a multitude of voice control platforms such as Apple’s Siri on your iPhone, Google Assistant for Android, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon Alexa and Atmos Control which can be used to control your devices and smart home, find information online, control your music, heating, lights; play content, run timers, send messages, open apps on your phone, read your notifications to you, connect to security cameras to see who is at your front door, adjust motorised blinds and unlock/lock the front door.  Voice control is also being added to other devices such as remote controls and microwave ovens.

Voice control can be a nice addition if you have an existing home automation system.  If you have a Vantage home automation system we can add voice control to your scenes.  Click here to learn more.

Or for basic voice interaction we can help you with an Alexa installation.  Click here if you’d like to learn more.

There are smart things happening with voice control such as continued conversation without needing to use the trigger phrase all the time, recognition of voice profiles for different people so the device knows who is talking to it, and the ability to ask for multiple things at the same time.  Devices gaining an understanding of context is giving voice control a lot more power to deliver the results we want so it will be interesting to watch this space to see how voice control further evolves and develops.

Interested to know how far the technology has come?  Read what we were saying about Voice Control in 2017 here.

Simplify life.