Voice - its beginning to be everywhere

Voice. And by Voice I mean the advent of a Voice based UI for systems is beginning to be everywhere. Since exploding onto the scenes in 2006 based on mobile phones its grown almost exponentially. Looking at its latest incarnation - the smart speaker (Amazon Alexia and Google Home are examples) recent estimates show around 50 million American’s have access to one of these in their home, although true sales figures are a little hard to come by but various estimates indicate that around 34 million smart speakers were sold in 2017 and we are heading for a further 57 million this year...!

OK its accepted that some homes will have more than one (we for example have three) but, there is probably significantly over 100 million smart speaker enabled homes out there on a global basis and the number is only going to continue to increase dramatically going forwards. Amazon Echo as first to market is comfortably in first place with around 70% market share. A bit more research to share with you – around two thirds of smart speaker owners interact with their speaker on a daily basis and three in four on a weekly basis.

This is now taking us down the path to where smart voice initiated conversations can become the default interaction point which is a significant shift from where we have been over just the last couple of years. So what does this mean for us, businesses and their customers?

And.. I'm back!

I can't believe its been over two years since last wrote an blog entry, for a blog called "A week in IT" which was intended to be a collection of weekly discoveries that's a bit poor - and for which I can but apologize. I have spotted I have a number of"draft" entries waiting to be published so those will be tidied up and slotted back into their correct weeks over the past two years.

However - to the current and June 2018... And, how to get started and "catch up" on 113 missing weeks... Well, a lot has happened over that time some of which will make great topics for blog entries too as and when the time is right.

As a key update - After 9 years in retail (with Tesco and Marks and Spencer) it was time for a bit of a change, and I'm now the "Head of Software Engineering" at the BBC for the BBC Platform. The next question everyone typically then asks is - what does that mean?