In McQuivey’s vision, devices like Dash will give way to networked mics throughout a home that will liberate voice control from any specific piece of hardware. These mics, he says, would cost no more than $25 apiece and use off-the-shelf parts already widely available: a microphone connected to an analog-to-digital converter, a Bluetooth radio, and a rechargeable battery.
“Much cheaper than placing cameras or other sensors throughout the house,” he writes, “(mics) can do many of the things you want those other sensors to do — identifying who is home and whether everyone is well—in addition to providing voice-based access to computing resources anywhere you are.”
Always present and always on, the voice layer will come to offer much more than spoken-word shopping. It will listen in, McQuivey says, and then funnel whatever information you request–when is a bill due? check me into my hotel–to the relevant device, whether phone, watch, or laptop. It will come to learn different family members’ voices and can send you a text, for instance, when your kid comes home from school, or doesn’t. The least plausible flight of fancy in the report is the prediction that a voice-control layer that’s always listening will come to know you better than you know yourself and offer you custom self-help advice as a result.
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