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    SMART SPEAKERS

    Jan 05, 2021 5 minutes
    BY ALEX COX

    When you think about it, it’s quite amazing how quickly smart speakers have become so completely normalized. Speech recognition has been around in some limited form since the 1960s when IBM built the Shoebox, capable of recognizing 16 words and numbers. In the mid–1990s, Dragon Dictate introduced reasonable (though sometimes comically imprecise) speech recognition on the desktop as long as you were willing to invest around twice the price of a computer to pick up V1 of its software. You could argue that it was Apple that brought voice tech to the masses with Siri, though Siri actually started development in 1993; Siri Inc was snaffled up by the Cupertino giant in 2010, and hit the iPhone in 2011.

    But to look at any company other than Amazon as the cause of the spectacular growth of smart speakers would be to look

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