Chatbots find voice as audio assistants rise

Regulators and the general public won't like people walking around with headphones that are always listening

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As voice-enabled AI gets smarter and more human-sounding, consumers will lap it up.

Speaking is about three times faster than typing for both English and Mandarin Chinese, according to a 2016 academic study, opens new tab. And leading speech-recognition models, like Open AI’s Whisper, opens new tab, claim error rates as low as 3%, meaning they get 97% of words right. That’s roughly as accurate as using a smartphone keyboard, since users typically have a typo rate of about 2%, based on a 2019 experiment, opens new tab.

Rather than using a web browser or a mobile application to order food or call a cab, it will become increasingly common to just speak to an AI assistant instead. Uber Technologies, opens new tab, for example, already supports, opens new tab voice commands for Siri users in English, German, Japanese, French, Hindi and Portuguese.

In theory, a customer wearing earbuds could order their favourite sushi dish without having to take their phone out of their pocket. That should also appeal to older or visually impaired users, who are sometimes less comfortable texting.