Other big tech firms have their own plans: Apple AAPL.O is taking its Siri voice assistant beyond its mobile devices to PCs, cars, and the home Baidu BIDU.O last month bought Raven, billed as China's answer to Amazon's Alexa intelligent personal assistant and Samsung Electronics 005930.KS plans to incorporate Viv, its newly acquired virtual assistant, into its phones and home appliances.īut not everyone thinks the future of communicating with the Internet of Things needs to be vocal.įacebook FB.O founder Mark Zuckerberg, for example, was working on Jarvis, his own voice-powered AI home automation, and found he preferred communicating by text because, he wrote, 'mostly it feels less disturbing to people around me.'Īnd several major appliance makers have turned to a small Singapore firm, Unified Inbox, which offers a service that can handle ordinary text messages and pass them on to appliances. This year, Voice Labs, a consultancy, expects 24.5 million appliances to be shipped. This voice-first market - combining voice with artificial intelligence (AI) - barely existed in 2014. CEO of Unified Inbox Toby Ruckert demonstrates how he uses his smartphone to control electrical appliances in a simulation software in Singapore March 3, 2017.
