The History of Virtual Home Assistants

Virtual home assistants date all the way back to the 1960’s with the IBM Shoebox that could recognize 16 words and 9 digits. In the 1990’s the first virtual assistants available to consumers hit the market. Dragon introduced the Dragon Dictate to recognize speech and Microsoft introduced clippy to recognize text. From these tools we learned that virtual assistants and voice recognition software could track text and interpret it then provide interactive feedback for users. It was also learned that privacy measures should be put in place to activate assistants only when they are called on. In April of 2011 apple introduced Siri, leading the way for voice recognition assistants as we know them today. Microsoft launched Cortona shortly after. In 2014 Amazon introduced the first Echo smart speaker with Alexa voice assistant capabilities. This gave consumers the chance to interact virtually with products within their home rather than just with their phones. The Alexa also lead to people connecting other home appliances to the Internet of things.

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