The rise of voice assisted technology is a phenomenon that has captured the attention of people of all ages. The seven year old in our home simply loves asking Siri, Cortana, or Google countless questions on a daily basis and that seems to be the case for a lot of parents and grandparents I talk to. This technology’s not just for kids of course – everyone in our home gets a lot of mileage out of these virtual assistants for everything from weather reports, to help typing texts, and for answering just about any question that pops up. Voice activated assistance is a technology with a ton of potential.
This popularity is the reason companies like Amazon and Google have entered the race with stand-alone devices that can act as virtual home assistants which are completely voice activated. Amazon’s Alexa is in a growing number of devices and Google’s Home device is doing quite well. People love the idea of an artificial intelligence that they can simply talk to and ask questions, play their favorite music, and add items to their schedule. The problem is these devices aren’t available in Canada yet and that’s extremely frustrating for early adopters.
Neither company is very clear on why they haven’t entered the Canadian market yet nor are they saying when they will. There’s no doubt our market is tiny compared to the US and that probably has something to do with it, but there are still a lot of consumers here anxiously awaiting the arrival of this technology. Canadians living near the border can always buy a device across the border and bring it back, but when you do this there are no guarantees that they’ll work properly as they weren’t specifically designed for our market. The rest of us will have to just wait patiently and perhaps send pleading emails to Amazon and Google asking them to give us what we want!
