The COVID-19 pandemic has come to change the way of life known so far in all aspects. The control of crowds, the increase in the time that people spend in their own home to avoid unnecessary exposure and self-imposed limitations when touching objects of all kinds, also resorting to disinfectant hand products after having done so.
Therefore, the interpersonal safety distance of two meters between people who do not live in the same family unit has practically become a mantra. And it makes the expert scientific community in the field of intelligent voice technology rethink that it could be the definitive impulse they need to fully establish themselves in people’s lives and daily lives.
And it is that voice technologies, such as Siri from Apple, Alexa from Amazon or Google Assist , which may be some of the best known and whose use is more widespread, are not limited only to solving queries or facilitating the purchases we make by Internet. Their development is already so advanced that they are used from for the intelligent control of the home to for medical applications in large hospitals.
For example, ABI Research analyst Jonathan Collins , predicts that, with the new paradigama of reducing physical contact motivated by the health crisis, voice technologies will be used to promote the avoidance of direct contact with surfaces that are very present in our everyday life: smartphones , television remote controls, light switches, thermostats and even doorknobs. Both in homes and in work spaces.
Robots, the new workers
In addition, experts from specialized companies in the sector such as Futuresource Consulting , agree that voice technologies will begin to spread especially in the field of health, as well as in others in which exposure to the public is unavoidable, such as commerce or gastronomy.
In this sense, Veton Kepuska , professor of computer engineering at Florida Tech, emphasizes that a kind of “humanoid robot” would be truly useful to strengthen health systems in situations such as COVID-19, since it could assume some of the functions performed by medical and nursing staff avoiding exposure of professionals to the virus.
