Digital Assistants are one of the greatest innovations of our generation. Every other tech company has invested in smart speakers. Be it Amazon, Google, or Apple. Google has Google Home, Apple has HomePod. and Amazon has the Echo. There have been amazing changes to your home appliances and in near future, it wouldn’t be a surprise if there are smart home appliances. Every year, these tech companies make changes in the models and introduce new features. Every smart device comes with an artificial intelligent virtual digital assistant which makes it easy for users to interact with devices without using their hands.
Although with all these advantages and luxury that these smart assistant provide, there are problems too. One of the biggest is as they could be called anytime to take help, they are always listening.
In this post, we have listed some of the points which will help us recognize whether smart devices are a good choice or a bad invention!
Life is Easy with the Convenience
At a low cost, smart devices provide us with convenience and help us complete our tasks with ease. The smart devices provide you with convenience in doing important tasks such as reminding appointments, booking appointments and more. Every product of technology is built to provide us benefit and comfort in performing tasks. People with undefined wealth depend on their labors for their household work or other errands. Technology is providing that comfort to all by smart home technologies at affordable prices. With artificial intelligence, the smart devices can help in grocery shopping, cooking, vacuuming and other tasks as well.
So, bottom line, as more and more people will be able to afford smart devices, human assistants will start getting replaced by digital ones. This will eventually result in digital assistant taking place of humans.
Autonomy Has a Role to Play
Generally, autonomy helps people with disabilities and elderly people but companies are focusing on a universal design which could help people with abilities to take benefit out of it. These smart home systems can help people with cognitive or physical impairments by helping them in opening doors or seeking professional help and more. It gives comfort to the elderly by doing chores and helps others in managing their regular lives.
These are things that could make it a necessary deal. However, it is also a safety concern for people as smart home devices listen & record everything as its microphone is always on.
Smart home devices collect and analyze personal information about users to let them get full access to features. You can get full benefits if you share your routines, locations, shopping history and more.
However, the downside of collecting information is companies such as Google, uses the information to monetize it in form of targets ads or more. Smart homes come broader security concerns. If you haven’t secured your devices properly, there is a risk to fall into prey. In 2018, Amazon Echo was forced to face the security risks when Alexa sent wrong messages to wrong recipients and laughed unprompted.
Objects Like People
All these issues and security concerns, users should think about the results of a human-like digital assistant. If you have noticed all of the digital assistants have a female voice and even if women have become successful and have the capability to be a contender for men. Still, this patriarchal world never lets go of a chance to demean women. Women are always supposed to play their roles as daughter, wife or mother. Siri, Alexa, act and do similar tasks, helping users, offering admin support and more. This seems to be disturbing.
Well, with all said and done, users are destined to get comfortable with the smart devices in the future. This will give control to the people who can access users’ data for their benefits. We don’t know whether security concern is the downside or the gender biased criteria is more philosophical.
No doubt homosapiens love the comfort and want to delegate tasks to others but they must learn to live with the dark side of it.