A new category of intelligent assistant is emerging and entering our households. Opus Research is primarily focused on the use of intelligent assistants for enterprises in customer care settings. These solutions are part of a larger ecosystem of self-service options that offer huge benefits to businesses and their customers. We also examine the personal assistant and personal advisor market. Personal assistants tend to be “horizontal” offerings that accomplish simple tasks while leaving the more complex transactions to specialists. Personal advisors focus on specialized services.

All of these solutions — customer-facing intelligent assistants, horizontal personal assistants, and specialized personal advisors — leverage many of the same technologies. Natural language understanding underpins all intelligent assistance, along with the ability to seamlessly translate user intent into appropriate responses and actions. Opus Research has tracked the technologies and solutions by developing an Intelligent Assistance landscape and Lead Analyst Dan Miller just published a piece on VentureBeat about how IA has entered the mainstream.

So what’s the emerging new category of intelligent assistant we’re seeing? With the advent of Amazon’s popular Echo and it’s built-in assistant Alexa, the personal assistant has entered our homes and taken on features of both the horizontal personal assistant and the more specialized personal advisor. Alexa offers a hands-free Voice User Interface (VUI) and has all the hallmarks of a general personal assistant. Leveraging your home’s WiFi connection, Alexa can reach back to the cloud to answer questions about weather, time, facts and trivia. Just like Siri, you can have Alexa set alarms and timers, play music from your favorite streaming service, and more.

But because Amazon has opened the Echo to 3rd party developers by means of the Alexa Skills Kit, Alexa can acquire specialized skills that are essentially boundless. Just as developers scurried to get their apps into app stores a decade ago, savvy developers are now creating skills for Alexa’s platform that leverage the Echo’s VUI. Many of these skills enable Alexa to offer more specialized services, such as executing banking transactions and controlling products in your smart home.

Smarty: An Intelligent Connected Device for Kids
Other companies are taking the successful Amazon Echo model and expanding it further. One example is Siliconic Home. A Silicon Valley based startup, Siliconic Home is developing a product called Smart Creature, aka Smarty. I learned more about the product in a discussion with Maura Sparks, vice president and co-founder of Siliconic Home.

Smarty is a product for the smart home built with a VUI. Smarty differs from the Amazon Echo in that it is designed specifically for children. The product leverages the company’s proprietary juvenile voice recognition engine to enable it to better understand younger voices and their idiosyncratic speech patterns.

Smarty offers capabilities similar to the Echo, but is designed as a companion for girls and boys. It’s meant to assist them in every aspect of their day, be it waking up on time, controlling the lights in their bedroom, helping them learn a foreign language or get more information on a homework topic, or telling them an engaging story while they take a breather before rushing off to soccer practice. Smarty plays the role of both intelligent personal assistant and personal advisor. Siliconic Home’s partnerships with content and skills providers will enable Smarty to constantly expand its capabilities.

What do we call this new category of smart, versatile and extensible in-home VUI devices? Some have suggested calling them personal assistant robots. Siliconic Home’s Sparks prefers to call their children’s device a “Connected Voice Interactive Product” or “Smart Speech Controlled Platform.” Whatever we call them, these intelligent connected devices are here and the ecosystems that fuel them are growing.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles