The Big Story Whose line is it anyway? After several years of watching Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook release seemingly “futuristic” smart home gadgets designed around AI smart assistants, I’m starting to wonder whether I missed the part where they explained what the point was. As I watched Amazon introduce device after device with Alexa functionality baked-in at their hardware event this week, I stopped to wonder whether anyone in these departments has thought up a convincing theory of what the voice assistant end game looks like. It doesn’t seem to be native advertising and it doesn’t seem to be connecting every gadget in your home, meanwhile third party app integrations have shown lackluster promise. When did all of these companies become so obsessed with being the middleman for users wanting to listen to a particular artist on Spotify? At this point seems as though the world’s largest tech companies are fighting tooth and nail over the home audio market, a space which seem worth all the effort. I think most of these companies have realized that the voice interface revolution isn’t going to arrive in its imagined form, in fact, most of the companies listed above have moved away from omniscient hockey puck designs to something even more boring, a picture-frame with an embedded speaker. The screens promise more context, but they also highlight that Silicon Valley doesn’t really know what to do with voice computing. At its AR/VR event last week, Facebook’s top execs talked intently about the idea of creating more believable spatialized audio, something that basically aims to trick a user into believing that a noise or voice is coming from a very particular point in space around them. Facebook is working hard on this problem to achieve some weird effects on an AR glasses device, where maybe you can see the image or avatar of a friend you’re on the phone with sitting in your apartment and the sound will seem like it’s coming exactly from the exact location in your room where the digital avatar is positioned. I doubt this is the end-all be-all use case, but it does fit into a world view where voice computing isn’t all that valuable on its own and needs to be teamed with some sort of visual feedback in order to catch on. Podcasts have shown their worth, audio-first social networks like Clubhouse have attracted investor attention, phone calls are still a thing, but what’s the missing piece? | 
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