CES 2017: Why voice control is the next big thing

By John Bugailiskis

LAS VEGAS – It’s taken nearly 30 years of development but artificial intelligence (AI), in the form of voice-enabled digital assistants, are poised to be the talk of the town when CES opens on Wednesday.“Applications for hub devices are set to grow by 50% over the next four days,” says Dr. Shawn DuBravac, chief economist of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), speaking to journalists. Leading that growth is Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant platform, which debuted in November 2014 when Amazon unveiled its “smart speaker” called Echo. DuBravac says devices like the Echo are creating a new era of “faceless computing”...