Ezra Steinhardt of Covington & Burling writes:
On January 12, the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas closed its doors for another year. Each CES raises a new set of technology themes, ranging from robots to smart fridges — and this year, the winner was voice technologies. Such technologies, while not entirely new, are now becoming mainstream: sales of smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo more than tripled in 2017, and it is now estimated that one in six Americans own a smart speaker. It is always difficult to predict the future, but voice enabled cars, home appliances, and other devices are all either on the way or already on the market, and the potential for voice interfaces to become new “platforms” — supporting third party services just like smartphones supported apps — is now clear to us all.
On the other side of the Atlantic, however, policymakers are going in another direction.
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