Smartphone Voice Recognition Market Growing Steadily

Market research firm Technavio is predicting steady growth for the smartphone voice recognition market, forecasting a CAGR of about 10 percent between 2015 and 2019.

One key market driver is the rise of speech-recognition based AI personal assistants such as Google Now, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, and other emerging systems. These systems tend to rely on voice command as the key user interface, and while they “are yet to find high adoption among smartphone users”, according to Technavio, “they are likely to become common features during the forecast period.” That seems a reasonable prediction, and that’s not even mentioning the potential boom in voice command through the myriad devices comprising the Internet of Things, where some expect it to be a key user interface.

Technavio also points to the rising use of voice verification on smartphones, which offers security benefits and risks. The firm says that while it could become an increasingly prevalent modality for user authentication, devices using always-on voice recognition run the risk of collecting sensitive personal information, which could potentially be breached; Technavio points specifically to last year’s controversy over the always-listening Samsung TV to illustrate this point.

Of course, technology that can recognize the voices of specific individuals should be able to prevent any cases of a smart home system taking orders from an unattended radio rather than an actual user.

(Originally posted on FindBiometrics)