Prepare for the battle of the digital assistants

I’m heading to Barcelona this week to spend some time at Mobile World Congress. Having missed out on last month’s CES show, I look forward to catching up on all the latest happenings in the mobile industry and (hopefully) discovering some weird and wonderful new technologies. If I can find something better than the grill-cleaning robot I came across at CES last year, I’ll be happy.

One thing I do know is that some new female sensations will be in town. Otherwise known as Alexa, Cortana, Siri and… Google Assistant, these virtual aides are increasingly making their presence felt as we hear of new developments that will integrate their capabilities into devices like TVs, cars and smart watches.

The assistants have had a bit of a rough ride until relatively recently. If you are so inclined, you can entertain yourself for some time reading about their various fails. I can’t pretend that I’m above finding some of them funny – like Tay, the rogue chatbot who came to a sorry end last year after learning some bad habits a bit too quickly. Also, I’m one of the people whose accent consistently perplexes the voice recognition technology, so it’s comforting to know I'm not alone.

But at the same time, it’s important to remember the critical role that experimentation, trial and error and – so often – timing play in laying the ground for the biggest breakthroughs. Back in 2009, YouTube was derided as a tech failure because it couldn’t monetise its offer. Yet once superfast 4G networks were introduced, paving the way for us all to watch branded, paid-for content – as well as homemade cat videos – on our smartphones, the company’s fortunes turned around. It is now valued at around $70 billion, with more than one billion unique visitors each month.

Like many emerging technologies, Cortana and her kin won’t really come into their own until they are part of an integrated ecosystem that allows us to use them without even thinking about it as we go about our daily business. This is going to need an enormous collaborative effort across many different industry sectors, effectively blurring or dissolving the lines between them, and creating new business models.

It’s one thing after all to ask your assistant to give you the latest weather report, remind you when it’s your wedding anniversary, or let you know if you’re likely to get stuck in some traffic.

It’s quite a different proposition to have an always-on, ever-ready virtual being at your disposal – one that intimately knows your digital footprint (for more on this, see my last post) and can use this information, along with what it has heard you talking about, to predict what you might want to do next with your connected devices. From booking travel, to ordering your shopping, flagging that your car needs a service, recording your favourite TV shows and recommending new ones, it won’t be too long before one (or more) of the available models can seamlessly do all of these things.

I think it’s time for us to sit up and pay attention to our new digital helpers. They are getting smarter all the time. And, once they’re able to anticipate and react to commands that work across different third-party apps, the prospect of what they’ll be able to do for us is quite phenomenal.

So I’ll be interested to see what happens when the latest models are showcased in Barcelona. Despite the title of this article, I’m not expecting some kind of head-to-head competition. Unless someone is secretly setting it up? This could be a whole new avenue for reality show developers to explore.

I’ll leave you with that thought…

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