Siri has over 375 million active users, but for the sake of brevity, I am not going into too much detail for Siri. Apple, Google and Amazon have very different approaches to their assistants, and as such, appeal to different types of developers and customers. In the western market, voice assistants are very much a three-horse race. It is implied by the context of the request what service the user wants. Implicit Invocation: ”Hey Google, what is the weather like today?” It is explicitly stated which skill is being asked for: Developer-made (third-party) skills can be invoked with a specific phrase, or, if the platform likes it, can be implicitly invoked, without a key phrase.Įxplicit Invocation: ”Hey Google, Talk to. Google opts for ‘Actions’, and Samsung goes for ‘capsules’.Įach platform has its own baked-in skills, like asking the time, weather and sports games. Voice Skillsįirst off, every platform has a different name for their ‘Voice Skills’, Amazon goes with skills, which I will be sticking with as a universally understood term. As smartphones have this functionality, they can also be considered a type of Multimodal voice-enabled device. Next up in the ranks is voice + screen, this is known as a ‘Multimodal’ device (more on these later), and are devices like the Nest Hub and the Echo Show. Smart Speakers like the Nest Mini & Echo Dot provide this kind of low-fi voice control. They require a Microphone, an internet connection, and a Speaker. The requirements for a device to be able to have a voice assistant baked in are pretty low. But each platform does this differently, and it’s the nuances of the platform that require a bit more understanding. There’s a lot going on there, most of which don’t require a second thought.
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