“Alexa, can you tell me the impact of the wholesale shift to voice search and voice communication over the Internet?”
Amazon’s wildly popular personal assistant, Alexa, probably cannot answer that question for you. And even she doesn’t perceive how she is making us dumber and taking our choices away.
The world is surely moving from text to voice as the primary interface on the Internet. The rapid rise of Amazon’s Echo (and its smaller version, the Echo Dot) personal assistant device was the biggest story of the 2016 holiday shopping season. As of September 2017, Amazon had sold 15 million Echos and Google had sold five million of its own personal assistant device, the Google Home. This is impressive, for a category that just a year earlier had not existed.
