By now you’ve probably heard of Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri.
These are the top three most popular voice commands on the web, and each one can help you navigate your daily life in a way that a human could never.
But there’s more to voice commands than just how you say them.
They can help automate everything from buying groceries to ordering a pizza.
And for many people, those commands will be the thing that really puts them over the top.
“We are seeing this shift from the consumer-facing to the industrial,” says Alex Ostrovsky, vice president of business development at Aptoide Technologies.
Ostrovskys team at Afton, Pennsylvania-based Aptom is working to make voice control easier, but the biggest thing the team is focused on right now is the IoT.
“When we think about IoT, we think of things that you can do in your home, but we’re thinking about things that can be automated.”
For Ostrova, that means things like controlling a refrigerator, vacuuming, turning off the TV, washing your car, or making sure your coffee machine doesn’t burn out.
That kind of automation will be part of the future of personal devices.
“You’ll be able to automate everything, and it’ll be really powerful,” he says.
With the right technology, voice control could also extend to everything from your house lights to your refrigerator.
Aptos products, including the Echo and Echo Dot, have already received billions of dollars in funding from investors, but Aptot is now looking to build on its success with a series of consumer-focused products.
“If you look at Alexa, there are a lot of people that love that, and you can have a very personal voice in your own home,” Ostrovesky says.
“A lot of them have had a problem with a particular appliance that they just can’t automate.
It could be their dishwasher, it could be the dishwasher itself, but they can’t control it.
They have to go to the Amazon Echo and go through that Alexa-type voice interaction.
So the consumer market is where we’re going to really see this shift, and that’s where Aptots products will help us make it happen.”