Cheer up, little guy. Better times are ahead.
Ten years ago a new and promising technology burst into our homes – the smart speaker. Like many tech-forward families, our household went all in. We got two Alexa speakers and two Google Homes, plugged them in, and they became fixtures in our kitchen and bedrooms for years.
Problem is, we kind of hate them now. At first they were cool – it was novel to talk to a device and have it actually work, at least for simple tasks like “what’s the weather today” or “play Vampire Weekend.” But we quickly grew disaffected with our new purchases, because more often than not, they failed when presented with even moderately complicated quer…
Cheer up, little guy. Better times are ahead.
Ten years ago a new and promising technology burst into our homes – the smart speaker. Like many tech-forward families, our household went all in. We got two Alexa speakers and two Google Homes, plugged them in, and they became fixtures in our kitchen and bedrooms for years.
Problem is, we kind of hate them now. At first they were cool – it was novel to talk to a device and have it actually work, at least for simple tasks like “what’s the weather today” or “play Vampire Weekend.” But we quickly grew disaffected with our new purchases, because more often than not, they failed when presented with even moderately complicated queries like “what time is the Giants game tonight” or “what’s on my grocery list.” In short, the first generation of smart home speakers were limited by a rigid approach to “intelligence” that didn’t scale. Only one sad, bedraggled Google Home remains in service in our kitchen, serving as a glorified clock radio (that’s it in the picture above). And it’s not doing Google any favors in the branding department, because whenever we ask it anything even slightly complicated, it fails, earning a string of expletives in the process*.
But all that is poised to change in 2026. We’re now all in the habit of having nuanced, complicated, and satisfying conversations with AI chatbots, and in the past year, those conversations have increasingly taken place on our phones, using a voice interface. Home speakers have been an obstinate exception to this new habit, but this year, the three major smart home players – Amazon, Google, and Apple – will finally integrate conversational generative AI into the next generation of their devices. If they work properly, we’ll finally get the voice-driven interface revolution I’ve been excited about for decades.
My prediction is this: By year’s end, we’ll have ambient AI in our homes, and it will actually work as expected. This in turn will shift what we expect as consumers of technology, in our cars, on our phones, and in the world around us. It won’t be a revolution, but when we look back at 2026 ten years from now, we’ll realize that this was the year “ambient intelligence” took off.
**I often imagine the poor QA engineers at Google or Amazon who have to listen to the snippets of audio the devices capture after their devices deliver reliably crappy results. I bet it’s gold. *
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*This is the fifth in a series of post I’ll be doing on predictions for 2026. The first four are here, here, here and here. When I get to #1, I’ll post a roundup like I usually do. *