* 24.5 mln voice-first devices to ship this yr, vs 6.5 mln
in 2016
* Others using messaging apps to control appliances
* Unified Inbox working with appliance makers vs Amazon,
SINGAPORE, March 13 (Reuters) - In today's so-called smart
home, you can dim the lights, order more toothpaste or tell the
kids to go to bed simply by talking to a small Wifi-connected
speaker, such as Amazon's Echo or Google's
Home.
This voice-first market - combining voice with artificial
intelligence (AI) - barely existed in 2014. This year, Voice
Labs, a consultancy, expects 24.5 million appliances to be
shipped.
Other big tech firms have their own plans: Apple is
taking its Siri voice assistant beyond its mobile devices to
PCs, cars, and the home; Baidu last month bought Raven,
billed as China's answer to Amazon's Alexa intelligent personal
assistant; and Samsung Electronics plans to
incorporate Viv, its newly acquired virtual assistant, into its
phones and home appliances.
But not everyone thinks the future of communicating with the
Internet of Things needs to be vocal.
Facebook 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."
And 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.
With your home added to the contacts list on, say, WhatsApp,
a quick text message can "start the coffee machine"; "turn on
the vacuum cleaner at 5 p.m."; or "preheat the oven to 200
degrees at 6.30 p.m."
"Think of it as a universal translator between the languages
that machines speak ... and us humans," said Toby Ruckert, a
German former concert pianist and now Unified Inbox's CEO.
The company is just a small player, funded by private
investors, but Ruckert says its technology is patent-backed, has
been several years in the making, and has customers that include
half of the world's smart appliance makers, such as Bosch
.
Unified Inbox connects the devices on behalf of the
manufacturer, while the consumer can add their appliance by
messaging its serial number to a special user account or phone
number. It so far supports more than 20 of the most popular
messaging apps, as well SMS and Twitter, and controls
appliances from ovens to kettles. Other home appliances being
tested include locks, garage openers, window blinds, toasters
and garden sprinklers, says Ruckert.
"People aren't going to want a different interface for all
the different appliances in their home," says Jason Jameson, of
IBM, which is pairing its Watson AI supercomputer with
Unified Inbox to better understand user messages. They will this
week demonstrate the service working with a Samsung Robot
Cleaner.
"The common denominator is the smartphone, and even more
common is the messaging app," Jameson notes.
"TROJAN HORSE"
There's another reason, Ruckert says, why more than half of
the world's smart appliance manufacturers have signed up.
They're worried the big tech companies'
one-appliance-controls-all approach will relegate them to
commodity players, connecting to Alexa or another dominant
platform, or being cast aside if Amazon moves into making its
own household appliances.
"Our customers are quite afraid of the likes of Amazon,"
Ruckert said. "Having a Trojan horse in a customer's home, like
Echo, that they must integrate with to stay competitive is a
nightmare for them."
An Amazon spokesperson said the company was "excited by the
early response by smart home device manufacturers and even more
excited by the customer response," but declined to speculate
about future plans.
A spokesperson for Bosch said no single company can knit the
Internet of Things together, so "there is a need to collaborate
and establish ecosystems," such as working with Unified Inbox.
Already the race is on to incorporate other services into
these home hubs.
Amazon allows third parties to develop apps, or "skills",
for Alexa. It has more than 10,000 of these, with many added in
just the past three months. Most are developed by firms using
Amazon's software toolkit, and range from telling jokes to
ordering food.
And Amazon makes it easy for other hardware makers to
incorporate Alexa into their appliances, increasing its reach.
Chinese device maker Lenovo has embedded Alexa in
its speakers, while General Electric has it in a lamp -
meaning users can control these devices by voice, and use them
to order products from Amazon. LG Electronics and
Huawei are also working on Alexa-enabled devices, Amazon said.
Text messaging, though, may yet break down those walls.
As Zuckerberg noted, the volume of text messages is growing
much faster than the number of voice calls. "This suggests that
future AI products cannot be solely focused on voice, and will
need a private messaging interface as well," he says.
EVEN SMARTER
Some companies are already looking further ahead, and doing
away with the need for any human instruction - whether by voice
or text - by making machines smarter at learning our habits and
anticipating them.
LG, for example, is using deep learning to make its
appliances understand and avoid objects in a room, or fill an
ice-tray based on a user's cold drink habits.
At Unified Inbox, Ruckert looks ahead to being able to
communicate not only with one's own appliances, but with
machines elsewhere. Bosch executives in Singapore, for example,
have demonstrated how a user could ask a smart CCTV camera how
many people were in a particular room.
Ruckert is also working with Singapore's Nanyang Polytechnic
to send updates to family members or staff direct from hospital
equipment attached to patients.
And smart appliance entrepreneur James Dyson said in a
recent interview that the future lies in what he calls "highly
intelligent automation".
"For me, the future is making everything happen for you
without you being particularly involved in it."
(Reporting by Jeremy Wagstaff; Editing by Ian Geoghegan)