The Age of Assistants Is Here, Now: Going beyond the screen to voice-drivenrninterfaces and conversational agents

摘要

The way we interact with our machines has been changing since thernintroduction of personalrncomputing. We’ve gone fromrncommand line interfaces tornWYSIWYG (what you see is whatrnyou get), to touch screens, tornvoice. Apple started this move tornthe voice interface with Siri, but,rnrecently, Amazon moved in withrnits home-based Alexa system onrnEcho speakers. Now, Voice isrnascendant and is making manyrnscreens invisible, thanks tornadvances in speech recognition. Arnplethora of players are currentlyrnjockeying to control the voice,rnconversational interface ecosystem. In this issue, a round-up ofrndevelopments and future prospects in the age of assistants, machine-basedrnsystems that do our bidding: we need only ask.