Aussie homes get smart
How voice recognition has been game changer
HANNAH BUSCH AMAZON’S Alexa is becoming a serious part of Australian home life.
It’ll check the weather for you. It’ll find a recipe for you. It’ll turn the lights on and get Netflix queued up on the TV. It’ll control your air-conditioning, your locks, your oven, your shower and even your dog’s collar if you want it to.
The smart home speaker is one of a few from Silicon Valley’s tech giants that are increasingly becoming musthave tech in Australia.
As it turns out, we really like voice assistants.
News Regional Media sat down with Amazon vice-president of smart home Daniel Rausch to see why Alexa is taking over tech-savvy Aussie homes.
The concept of a smart home has been around a lot longer than Alexa. It’s been promised in sci-fi for decades, and been toyed with by tech companies since at least the 70s.
“If you pull back and just look at the history of smart home, you have a segment that was about to take off for literally decades,” Rausch said.
“Dating back to the 70s, you have your smart home system starting to appear.”
More recently, smart phones stepped up the ability to control parts of the home. But Rausch said it did not take off because it failed to actually make life easier.
“It wasn’t actually more convenient. It wasn’t actually simpler,” he said.
“Then you have this voice moment. The interface is simple for the first time. You can all adopt it together, whomever you live with.
“We had this seachange moment where smart homes became actually useful.
“Within weeks of Alexa launching, we saw customers using the to-do list to turn on the lights.
“These were smart home hacker types.”
In the three years to the end of 2017, Amazon developed Alexa and worked with other companies to create 4000 compatible devices.
Things like light bulbs, fans and televisions gained built-in capability to work with the Alexa AI.
By the end of 2018, it had exploded to 28,000 compatible devices. In 2019, Rausch expects the growth in voiceenabled devices to be even faster.
He said Alexa owners had proven that once they adopted voice activation, their habits did not go back. That includes Aussie users.
“The appeal of voice access, the simplicity of voice control, the delight that you can get through just being able to ask a question and get an answer simply … or the simplicity of being able to set a kitchen timer while my pasta’s cooking and my hands are full,” Rausch said.
“These are moments where we observe customers worldwide changing their habits.”
“That truly is a universal change.”
How is Australia using smart home speakers?
Amazon has only been in the Australian market for a year, and Rausch said it was still early days.
But in a country where tech adoption tends to be slower than America or Europe, smart home speakers are proving popular.
Rausch said Australians were particularly engaged with devices that managed energy use.
Unsurprisingly, Australians are keen to use smart thermostats.
Outside of energy management, Aussie users are much like their US and European counterparts. They want smart home speakers to turn on the lights, play music or get the weather forecast.
In a few years, Rausch predicts interfaces like Alexa will be an even deeper part of home routines.
“The lights might come on automatically, the temperature might adjust for you. You can imagine where we’re going.”
“When we launched the first Echo, Alexa could do 13 things. So in a few short years, we’ve gone from 13 things to many millions of things.”
Quirky game like Mr Men in dystopia
USUALLY when we think of conspiracies, deep state actors and silencing dissent, we think of rainy cyberpunk-type settings where it’s always night, everyone wears trenchcoats and people who ask too many questions disappear without explanation.
However, as the game Pikuniku explores, this sort of thing can happen in a bright, upbeat world where primary colours feature prominently and even the giant robots are endearing.
Developed by Sectordub and published by Devolver Digital for the Nintendo Switch and PC, Pikuniku is a puzzle adventure game that can best be described as Mr Men in dystopia.
The colourful, simplistic FUN: Pikuniku adventure game. world, with an art style similar to children’s TV show Hey Duggee, belies the setting where everything is not nearly as happy as it seems.
What starts as a fun adventure – jumping puzzles, navigating sunflower fields, helping lost birds return to their mum – soon turns out to have much higher stakes as Piku, the titular character, gets involved in exposing a deep state conspiracy and fomenting a rebellion against the oppressors.
What’s really impressive about Pikuniku is it works on two levels – it’s a straightforward puzzle adventure game which is bright and fun, with challenging puzzles, which will appeal to younger gamers, but there’s also the whole “unravelling a conspiracy and leading a rebellion” thing for adults.
It might not be a AAA title, but if you like your games quirky, fun and subversive then Pikuniku is well worth playing.
Royce Wilson