Selecting content via voice only works when you can either name exactly the content you want, or you are choosing a general category to play.
Browsing content, or looking it up, via voice is slow and playful, it always will be. Who what's to be saying "next", "scroll down", or have a full on conversation with an AI to try and work out what you want to play? Our fingers on our hands have evolved to be incredible at interacting with things, we are good at using them. Touch screens or physical UIs will never be superseded by voice.
So yes, there is a small use case for voice for controlling music/tv, or controlling a few things in the home (heating, blinds, lights) but thats it, I don't believe there is this massive opportunity to expand it into our everyday lives where we are constantly interacting with devices via voice.
You don't need to name content exactly. Saying "Alexa, play the sandwich song from Frozen" for example will correctly play Love is an Open Door. Ideally this kind of thing would work for TV and movies too, web searches as well.
Humans evolved language to communicate ideas, wants and desires to others for thousands of years. Obviously voice UI is not there now but maybe someday the experience won't be much different than asking the movie rental store clerk for their recommendations for a romantic comedy.
>Saying "Alexa, play the sandwich song from Frozen" for example will correctly play Love is an Open Door.
I bet ya some engineer at Amazon hooked that up manually when they saw a bunch of requests failing, so that’s only gonna work for popular fuzzy naming conventions.
I don’t want to have to think “is this a way lots of people are gonna request this song?” before saying it that way.
That is still an example of knowing the content that you want to play exactly, you just don't remember its official name - and yes, search engines have gotten pretty good at this.
The more relevant use case is "hmm, I'd like to listen to some prog rock, let me browse what Spotify has and see what takes my fancy". Sure, I could say "VA, play prog rock", but I don't want it to choose for me: I want to browse the available content to remind myself what are my options, and choose one when I see one that looks interesting.
Browsing content, or looking it up, via voice is slow and playful, it always will be. Who what's to be saying "next", "scroll down", or have a full on conversation with an AI to try and work out what you want to play? Our fingers on our hands have evolved to be incredible at interacting with things, we are good at using them. Touch screens or physical UIs will never be superseded by voice.
So yes, there is a small use case for voice for controlling music/tv, or controlling a few things in the home (heating, blinds, lights) but thats it, I don't believe there is this massive opportunity to expand it into our everyday lives where we are constantly interacting with devices via voice.