The voice of the future

What skills will our children need to get ahead as the world of self-drive vehicles rushes toward us?

It is time to ask: will my son, now eight months old, ever learn to drive a car? Or touch-type? He is now learning to crawl, having mastered sitting. This is just the beginning of his discovering how to get around in the world.

But in about 15 years’ time, when he needs to start driving himself, will that kind of skill even be necessary?

The world is changing at a phenomenal rate, with exponential shifts in new technology and the promises they hold.

What was seemingly set in stone five or 10 years ago has dramatically changed, and not least of these is driving one’s own car.

“It is estimated that autonomous vehicles will account for 40% of the personal mileage driven in Europe in 2030,” says a PWC report, called “Five Trends Transforming the Automotive Industry”.

It adds that 55% of all new car sales in Europe may be fully electrified by 2030. “The car of the future is electrified, autonomous, shared, connected and yearly updated = ‘eascy’.”

I’m considering an electric vehicle as my new car this year — though the choices are very limited in SA right now — so by the time my son takes to the road, not only will the cars be electric but autonomous too.

I should hope those are the conversations we’re having in 15 years: not electric over petrol, but what brands of autonomous car to choose from.

By then the interface for dealing with a computer, be it in our home or our car, will almost certainly be voice. Star Trek’s classic depiction of voice mode, where the characters say “computer” and then give an instruction, is already happening with voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google’s Assistant and Samsung’s Bixby. These assistants are the current way we deal with artificial intelligence (AI) and will get more sophisticated and better at understanding us.

With our smartphones as our primary link to the Internet and all the power of cloud computing, voice is increasingly the primary interface.

This was evident at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas in January, which showed the range of new services and implementations, including in many makes of car.

Consider the evolution of typing. When I studied journalism in the late 1980s, the only students who needed to learn to touch-type were journalists and secretaries.

I learnt on a good old mechanical typewriter. By the time I finished my degree, schoolchildren were touchtyping as part of their syllabus.

But touch-typing is a hack of an interface. It was just the best alternative until the computers learnt to understand our natural speech. And they are getting better at it.

The network effect means such voice interfaces will get better as more people use them.

They’ll even learn our funny SA accents, and hopefully know we mean “traffic light” when we say “robot”.

By the time my son takes to the road, the cars will not only be electric but also autonomous