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Siri, Echo and Google Home: Are Digital Assistants the Future of the Office?

05/12/2016
Media Agency
London, United Kingdom
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Carat UK chief executive, Rick Hirst, discusses the usefulness of this new technology

Major tech companies have invested in AI-driven and voice interactive home assistants in a quest to make our digital lives more convenient.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley earlier this year predicted that half of US jobs will be replaced by robots in just 20 years. Elon Musk caused a Twitter storm over his fears about how artificial intelligence (AI) could soon assume control of the internet. Technology is changing the way we work and it’s only accelerating. If Musk is worried, should we be too?

Apparently not if you listen to the technology giants at the forefront of this revolution. They seem to believe that we’re hungry, starving in fact, for more gadgetry to make our lives easier/more fun/more productive/easier to bear. We now trust smart thermostats to reduce our bills, we’re testing cars that drive themselves and we can control our speaker systems from anywhere in the house. The latest buzz is about personal digital assistants who can help us navigate our days both at home and in the office.

Read the marketing spiel around Amazon Echo and Google Home and it appears that talking to a shiny box is the new alternative to pressing the touchscreen of a shiny box. Now our thumbs can be put to better use. Whatever way you look at it, one thing’s for certain – this technology is here to stay.

But you may have noticed above that I’ve put this tech in a specific box – a small business-sized box. Why? Let’s not forget that Echo is a speaker. Yes, a very smart speaker, but speakers are designed to do one thing really well - broadcast. Sharing your calendar plans might be okay  in your home office, but it’s certainly not something you’d see as being de rigueur for a bigger enterprise, especially given the modern propensity to open plan office design. With no visible screens and no pre-filter capabilities, I’m sure the employment tribunals would have little sympathy with Alexa announcing, “Redundancy meeting with Jack at 3pm,” to the entire 11th floor.

And while we’re on the topic of privacy, if Alexa wants to spend her day listening to the nonsense conversations I have at home then she’s welcome. However, these systems work on the basis that they’re always on, always listening. Do we want Amazon or Google listening in to our private or privileged work conversations? In a corporate context I’m sure there’ll be compliance professionals shuddering in their chairs at the thought of the data protection issues. Furthermore, do we know if these systems can be hacked? A quick search for “laptop camera cover” on Google reveals around 4.6m listings. That’s a lot of people worried that they’re being spied on.

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