Skip to main content

Amazon and Google’s voice assistant speakers could soon become your next landline

While most folks are ditching their landlines because they now have a phone with them wherever they go, they might make a comeback as a feature in voice assistant speakers, reports The Wall Street Journal.
According to the WSJ’s sources, Google and Amazon are considering adding the ability to make and receive voice calls to the companies’ Home and Echo devices respectively. They’re currently equipped to handle tasks like controlling your lights and smart appliances, streaming music and ordering groceries online. Enabling voice calls would certainly make those voice-activated speakers a lot more useful, and give you another reason to stop carrying your smartphone around the house all the time.
Of course, the big question is, how will calls work? Google already has a bunch of products like Hangouts and Voice for handling voice communication, and syncs your contacts’ numbers across its apps. It also has Duo for video calls and the company said last August that it planned to add support for voice-only chats.
Amazon might find it a bit more difficult to introduce this feature: While it just launched a new app for video conferencing that it could borrow technology from, it doesn’t yet have a way to access your contacts. The company is reportedly considering multiple approaches to this problem, including grabbing contact information from your paired phone, integrating third-party apps like Skype and perhaps even giving your Echo its own number.
It’ll also be interesting to see just how well both devices’ far-field microphones fare when it comes to call quality. Right now, they’re good enough to hear you from anywhere in a reasonably sized room and understand commands, but can they also transmit clear audio to callers if you’re not standing close to your speaker?
Regardless, it sounds like a good idea because it solves the two major problems with traditional landline phones: People can’t be bothered to remember phone numbers or fiddle with another device to place a call. Hopefully both companies will be to figure out a decent solution in the near future.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ChatGPT comes to Android next week, but you can sign up today

  Two months after   launching for iOS , ChatGPT is available to “pre-order” for Android users who want to take   the ubiquitous chatbot  on the go. If it’s anywhere as popular as the iPhone version, expect to see some big numbers over the next few weeks. Of course any mobile user can access ChatGPT or other OpenAI tools via the web interface, but the superior experience of a dedicated app has proven extremely compelling, to put it lightly. iPhone users downloaded it half a million times in the first week, impressing everyone  until Threads came along and blew it out of the water . The ChatGPT app on Android  looks to be more or less identical to the iOS one in functionality, meaning it gets most if not all of the web-based version’s features. You should be able to sync your conversations and preferences across devices, too — so if you’re iPhone at home and Android at work, no worries. Of course it won’t be completely identical, since the two mobile operating systems differ in many way
Post a Comment
Read more

Tinubu Ministerial Nominies and thier state of Origin.

  The President of the Senate,  Senator   Godswill Akpabio has received 28 ministerial nominee s from President  Bola Tinubu with no state of origin attached, Vanguard has gathered. The list was delivered  by the former Speaker,  House of  Representatives  and Chief  of Staff to President  Tinubu, Femi  Gbajiabiamila who entered  the hallowed  Chamber  at 1.18 pm and delivered  the letter at 1.19 pm The letter was addressed to the President of the  Senate,  Senator  Godswill  Akpabio.  The 28 Ministerial  Nominees are Abubakar Momoh; Amb. Yusuf Maitama Tuggar;  Architect Hammad  Dangiwa; Hanatu Musawa;  Chief Uche Nnaji; Beta Edu; Doris Aniche;; David Umahi ; Nyesom Wike; Mohamed Badaru Abubakar  and Nasir El- Rufai.   Others are Ekperikpe Ekpo; Nkiru onyejiocha; Olubumi Ojo;  Stella Okotekpe;  Uju Kennedy; Bello Mohammed Goroyo; Dele Alake; Lateef Fagbemi and  Mohammed Idris. Others are Edu Muhi; Waheed Adebayo; Imma  Suleiman; Ali pate;  Joseph Utsev from Benue; Abubakar kyari; John
Post a Comment
Read more

UK scholarships for international students 2023-2024

Black Future Leader Award at Imperial College Business School 2023 Imperial College Business School is proud to be a global organisation with students from all over the world. Currently, students from Black or mixed black backgrounds are underrepresented in our student cohort and we're working to improve this. To encourage this further, we are offering scholars Deadline: March 24, 2024 Posted: Yesterday BU Sport Scholarship 2023 The BU Sport Scholarship is available to high-level sporting athletes coming to study at either undergraduate or postgraduate level at BU. The scholarship is designed to provide you with the funding you need to develop your sporting abilities and take them to the next level. You can apply for up Deadline: August 31, 2023 Posted: Yesterday University of Birmingham School of Mathematics - School Scholarships 2023 The School of Mathematics is keen to attract well-motivated and able students to engage in research mathematics and invite applications for scholars
Post a Comment
Read more