VCCP's Innovation Lead Will Harvey Gives the Lowdown on Day One at CES

The first week of the new year sees the technology industry descend upon Las Vegas for the largest electronics show on earth: CES.

Amongst them is VCCP’s Innovation Lead Will Harvey who, after attending the pre-opening hosted by Shawn DuBravac, Chief Economist of Consumer Technology Association, has some tips on what to watch out for on the show floor. And it’s all about the new interface of computing: your voice.

With the introduction of GUI (graphical user interfaces) into personal computing back in the 80s, the world witnessed a dramatic shift in how we interact with technology. From a complex, text-based interface we have moved towards a more user-friendly navigation that has fundamentally shifted the personal electronics industry.

Some of you may already be familiar with the Word error rate (WER), the common metric for the performance of speech recognition or machine translation system. In 1995, when Microsoft kicked this off it had a 100% error rate, in 2013 it was down to 23% and now in 2017 it is just 5%, which is the same error rate humans have with one another. In fact, we’ve seen more advances in the last 30 months than in the last 30 years.

This will usher in a new era of faceless computing, something we’re starting to see penetrate a number of sectors, particularly with wearables and perhaps most recently in partnership with the AI assistance boom, such as with Google Home and Amazon Echo – more on that tomorrow.

With this new interface comes new opportunity. We can expect to see voice activated systems double in 2017 and we’ll see brands leverage the meta data collected from these systems to inform more advanced and accurate future interactions.

This is rich and vibrant territory for marketers and brands to create more personalised interactions through individual speech recognition. It’s also a simpler and more natural progression for the interface of the machines with which we are increasingly surrounding ourselves. 

Over the coming days we expect to see an increasing trend of baking this new form of interaction into products. It’ll be fascinating to see how it plays out – so stay tuned and make sure you follow Will’s updates on Snapchat (williamedharvey) where he’ll be using his Spectacles to bring us closer to the action.