Putting the voice assistant speaker craze in context

September 15, 2017

If you believe the hype, homes in the US are already lousy with speakers containing embodied AI — the most high profile being Amazon’s Echo, in its various incarnations, whose Alexa voice assistant can be commanded to do things like play music, answer trivia questions or tap into third party apps (via an ever-expanding set of so-called ‘skills‘). But the truth is these virtual personal assistant (VPA) speakers remain very…