The Rapid Rise of the Smart Personal Assistant
The smart personal assistant revolution is moving forward at
a breakneck pace. It took approximately 30 years for the cellular telephone to
begin outnumbering people on the planet, but smart personal assistants are
projected to outnumber humans in half of that amount of time by 2021. The technology-research
firm Canalys
expects 100 million smart speakers (smart personal assistants) will be
installed worldwide by the beginning of 2020 and also estimates the number of
smart assistant compatible devices will reach 1.6 billion in the US that same year.
The numbers are staggering.
It is precisely because of these numbers that manufacturers
of smart personal assistants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are
pushing sales of their devices. Not only does a smart personal assistant allow
for corporate monetization post-purchase from user data collection it is on the
forefront of taking over your everyday space whether that be your home, car, or
office. The corporation that garners the biggest market share with their smart
assistant technology will lock in app developers, appliance manufacturers, and
consumers into their company’s proprietary platform also called the ecosystem
which ensures frictionless interoperability. Home automation and lighting is
forecast to make up 49 percent of the market segment, followed by home security
and surveillance (18 percent), audio and video entertainment (13 percent) and “other”
appliance segment (20 percent).
The smart assistant with its voice technology is a significant
boon to US seniors as more baby boomers are opting to age in place and smart
voice technology simplifies remaining at home. There are the obvious uses for a
smart assistant like calendaring events, medication reminders, home
environmental controls, age-appropriate learning activities, and much more. Some
of the newer applications of voice technology are pushing smart personal
assistants into newer realms like digital therapist, companion, and caregiver.
For the senior who is living at home and alone, these are wonderful new
developments.
Research in the field of prosody, the patterns of stress and
intonation in a language, are making smart assistants capable of detecting
depression, loneliness, anxiety, joy, and anger to name a few. Initial research
of emotion enabled artificial intelligence focused on emotion detection through
facial expressions but quickly turned to the spoken word. Vocal signatures
carry an incredible array of information from how you string the words in a
sentence together, to tone, depth, rhythm, pitch, resonance, pronunciation,
tempo, and more. These vocal features are then analyzed to suggest a person’s
mood and subsequent best action practice for the senior.
The practical applications of this technology are numerous.
A medical doctor with a smart personal assistant in their office can more
readily pick up on identifiers that suggest patient depression. A smart car
speaker in a semi-autonomous car can make informed judgments about the safety
of handing over the controls to the driver based on vocal characteristics
indicating stress or confusion. A smart personal assistant might pick up on
loneliness in a stay at home senior and offer suggestions of music or other
activities to engage the senior and lift their spirits. The smart personal
assistant is also “someone” an elderly person can tell their troubles to
without shame, recrimination or judgment. The smart assistant is programmed so
that it never gets tired, never becomes distracted or bored with the content of
“its person." It is a bit like a therapist allowing the senior to get out
all of their frustrations about growing old and losing their physical and
cognitive abilities; even expressing fears for their future.
While smart personal assistant technology is currently not
able to provide all of the benefits of a professionally trained human
caregiver, therapist, or companion it is readily available, overall
inexpensive, and can help alleviate the problems of too many seniors with too
few attainable human caregivers to meet their needs. The technology may also
outpace its human counterpart in the not too distant future if current research
and development is any indication of success. The market forces for profit will
continue to drive the expansion of the smart personal assistant and its
associated products allowing for newer market segments and more importantly the
ability for stay at home seniors to live their best quality of life.
Elder Law of Omaha, P.C, L.L.O. – Catherine N. Swiniarski,
J.D.
(402) 614-6400
Free Initial Attorney Consultations
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