Amazon’s Echo – an always-on, internet-connected speaker that responds to voice commands – found its way to the UK last month. You can ask it what the weather is doing, to order you a cab, play music and so on.
Echo is nothing terribly new: you’ve probably got Google Now or Siri on your phone. What’s different is the home-robot-helper feel that is introduced by the fact that Echo is always listening. This creates concerns about privacy, marketing and Amazon’s harvesting of data, among many other things.
As with any newly arrived technology, there will be hype and reality around Echo and similar technologies. They may turn out to be the “next big thing” – or just the faintly amusing “thing that never took off back then”. No one knows.
But a range of things should be of interest to museums in the Echo story. First, interactions are moving beyond screen and keyboard, and into voice and other senses, and this changes the nature of the interaction in profound ways.
Second, as with any new technology, there’s a question of novelty versus longevity: just because you could have voice-focused tools for users doesn’t necessarily mean you should.
Finally, there is a playful and personal nature to the interactions with Echo that museums would be advised to study, given how different they are from what has come before.
Echo is nothing terribly new: you’ve probably got Google Now or Siri on your phone. What’s different is the home-robot-helper feel that is introduced by the fact that Echo is always listening. This creates concerns about privacy, marketing and Amazon’s harvesting of data, among many other things.
As with any newly arrived technology, there will be hype and reality around Echo and similar technologies. They may turn out to be the “next big thing” – or just the faintly amusing “thing that never took off back then”. No one knows.
But a range of things should be of interest to museums in the Echo story. First, interactions are moving beyond screen and keyboard, and into voice and other senses, and this changes the nature of the interaction in profound ways.
Second, as with any new technology, there’s a question of novelty versus longevity: just because you could have voice-focused tools for users doesn’t necessarily mean you should.
Finally, there is a playful and personal nature to the interactions with Echo that museums would be advised to study, given how different they are from what has come before.
