“Alexa, what can you do?”

“Anything.”

Imagine a world where voice assistants can do virtually anything a computer can do and more. This idea is on track to becoming a reality with an upcoming historic partnership between Microsoft and Amazon.

Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Alexa will soon be able to communicate with one another. Their partnership effectively creates a voice assistant that has both the features of Cortana and Alexa.

The collaboration is a major step toward creating a more open industry for voice assistants, which many believe are the next big revolution in computing. Amazon and Microsoft are providing a glimpse into a future in which voice assistants are more versatile than they are today. Eventually, voice assistants could come stacked with features that help everyone from students to scientists.

The voice assistant industry is undergoing a huge growth spurt. As more users adopt voice technology, more people are developing open source and other collaborative projects for it.

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Common Voice is an open-source project launched by Mozilla with the goal of creating a database of audio samples. This database will help developers build voice assistants that can understand more complex phrases and requests.

The fab four of voice assistants — Cortana, Siri, Alexa and Google — all have different specialties and features. Assistants like Siri and Cortana are currently used in the consumer space to manage calendars, conduct internet searches and send messages, among other tasks.

As technology advances, there could be customized programs built for different industries. The key is the context in which the voice assistant is being used, said Punit Soni, a former lead product manager at Google who worked on the Google Voice Project.

Voice assistants, like most new technology, will start in the consumer sector. But it will gain more traction when it is deployed in enterprise systems where there is a real, logical use case, Soni said.

In other words, this type of technology will become more valuable when used in the professional environment.

Education, for example, could be a potential sector for consumer-based voice assistants, which could provide students with immediate access to information and enable them to learn more material in a shorter period.

On the enterprise side, it becomes more difficult to determine what industries would benefit from a specifically designed voice assistant. Some people working in a particular industry would profit from using this technology, while others may not.

Although this technology is advancing rapidly, it’s unlikely users will rely exclusively on voice assistants, Soni said. And though voice assistants may not solve every problem, they can still be used as a tool to improve people’s lives. Voice computing is a revolutionary technology because it enables users to interact with highly intelligent computers in the most human way possible.

Incredible companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft are pioneering a future powered by the sounds of our voices, and people can’t wait to hear it.

Daniel Strauss is a junior finance major and public communications minor. His column appears biweekly. He can be reached at dstrauss@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @_thestrauss_.

Published on September 17, 2017 at 10:47 pm