By 2023, Alexa will be nearly 10 years old, and by then I guarantee it will have become an integral part of daily life. Voice will become as essential to your daily routine as your mobile is today, and Amazon Alexa will be right at the centre of that. Below is how I think an average day of my life will play out in 2023.
6:00
My alarm goes off, waking me up, and I use a voice command to stop the racket. I ask Alexa to bring up my morning flash briefing. The screen mounted on the wall immediately comes to life and brings up a personalised dashboard showing everything I need to know. It includes highlights from news stories I am interested in, important emails I’ve received overnight, social media notifications, my current bank balance, along with any outgoing payments, and any meetings I have coming up that day. Alexa asks me if I would like to know more. I ask it to give me a breakdown of the day’s meetings, as I know I will be at a lot today. The meetings tab on the dashboard opens up and provides me with a comprehensive schedule for the day, which I then ask to be pushed through to my phone.
With the introduction of the Amazon Echo Spot, I can only see the integration of screens into the Alexa experience getting more and more sophisticated. We all check our phones quickly before getting out of bed, and a morning briefing of this kind will cut down our morning ritual of checking every notification by showing all the information in one place.
6:30
I head downstairs to the kitchen and ask Alexa to make me some toast and pour me a coffee. Using voice recognition technology, Alexa cooks the toast and makes the coffee to my exact preferences.
Voice recognition technology already exists in Alexa, and it’ll be incredibly powerful once it’s been harnessed properly. Using voice recognition, users will be able to apply their own preferences to household devices so that very basic voice commands will result in a highly personalised service. Let’s say you drink espresso and your partner likes a latte. If you ask Alexa to make you a coffee, it will make you an espresso. If your partner asks the same question, they’ll get a latte.
7:00
Alexa reminds me that I have a class at the Boxing Gym at 7:30, and by using integration with Citymapper it comes up with a list of options on how to get there. I tell Alexa that I will take the bus, which arrives at the stop next to my house in 5 minutes. I have been working on defensive technique recently, so it asks whether I would like to view a YouTube video of Floyd Mayweather’s defence for inspiration while I wait for the bus to arrive.
Once transport apps such as Citymapper are integrated with Alexa, this will provide Alexa with the ability to let you know when to leave for meetings, and suggest potential routes. Alexa will also track your current interests to suggest content to view or read during ‘dead’ time, such as when you are waiting for a bus.
8:45
My boxing class overruns, and I just make it back to the house in time to get dressed for my meeting. While I’m getting changed I ask Alexa to order me an Uber to my next meeting. Within minutes a driverless Uber arrives to pick me up.
Uber is already integrated with Alexa, but this will only improve. Currently you can simply order an Uber to your current location, but in the future you will be able to ask Alexa to take you to a pre-scheduled appointment, and it will get your ride booked without you having to even say the address. By 2023, it’s also highly likely that most Ubers will be driverless.
13:00
After a long morning of meetings with clients, I pull out my phone and ask Alexa to hail me an Uber back to my office in Brixton. I am starving, but very busy, so I decide to have lunch in front of my computer. I ask Alexa to have my usual order from Pret sent to my desk.
Currently, Alexa largely caters to the home speaker market. However, I am certain it will go mobile before too long. All I am unclear on is how it will do so. Will Amazon find a way to get it onto iPhone and Samsung? Will they release a wearable, or even a phone of their own? I’m not sure on the specifics, but by 2023, I guarantee we will be using Alexa on the move.
15:00
I head into a planning meeting with my team. We each take it in turns to ask Alexa to pull up our work dashboards, and it uses voice recognition to display the correct dashboard. These each contain planned work and targets for the week, projects completed, upcoming meetings, and any other business to discuss. I pull up my dashboard, ask Alexa to expand the meetings tab, and run through the day’s meetings with the team.
At present, Alexa is typically seen as a gadget to be used at home, but in 5 years’ time it will be an integral part of office life. Nobody likes a meeting where everyone is fumbling for the HDMI cable to show their screen to the room; with Alexa this will become a thing of the past.
16:30
Alexa pops up to ask what I would like to eat for dinner. I ask it to call my wife so we can discuss. We decide on Chinese, so I ask Alexa if I have the ingredients in the fridge to make my favourite stir fry recipe. Alexa says I am missing noodles and chicken, and orders them on Amazon to arrive at my house at 7pm.
Provided you have a smart fridge, by 2023, Alexa will be able to check what ingredients you have in your fridge, check that against a recipe you want to cook, and order in anything you do not have before you get home from work. Realising you don’t have that key ingredient when you’re chopping your onions will become a thing of the past.
20:30
After dinner, and once the kids have gone to bed, we decide to watch a film. My wife and I often struggle to pick a film, so we ask Alexa what we should watch. Taking both of our tastes into account, it suggests a number of films on Prime that we are both likely to enjoy.
Picking films in a group can be difficult. In the future, Alexa will be able to take into account the tastes of each individual in the room and suggest films that are likely to be suitable for everyone. This will cut down on the endless Netflix scroll that can sometimes take longer than actually watching a film!
22:45
After the film has finished, I head to bed and pop my headphones on. I ask Alexa to play my audiobook until I fall asleep. When I fall asleep, it switches off instantly.
Alexa will be able to monitor the noises you make when you’re falling asleep, and will be able to switch off any content you are watching or listening to just before you fall asleep. No more waking up in the morning to realise 7 hours of your audiobook have disappeared!
These are just some of my ideas, and I’m working every day on making many of them a reality. How else would you like Alexa to become part of everyday life by 2023? Let me know in the comments below.