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Voice is rapidly becoming the next mainstream interface mode.

It has of course been common for some time with smartphones and specialist devices, and all the major device and operating systems have voice recognition. However, we’re starting to see a shift in the prevalence of this function.

The advantages of using your voice instead of your fingers to communicate are obvious — you can say something much faster than you can type it.

About five years ago in 2016, researchers at Stanford University tested how quickly and how accurately search requests could be done using voice, and compared those results against typing. The researchers found that verbally making the search request in English was three times faster than typing in English and speaking in Mandarin Chinese was 2.8 times faster than using a keyboard. Error rates using speech were also lower.

That research by Stanford was done on smartphones and was discrete from other apps or work. When you bring today’s voice technology onto the PC, opportunities for integration, and to be able to do useful work, grow dramatically.

The gateway to opportunities

At Lenovo, voice is an important part of our smarter device strategy. We want devices (PCs, smartphones, smart home devices and tablets) to serve as hubs to help users manage their lives in the home and at work, wherever that may be.

Lenovo has been working together with Amazon since 2017 to bring voice AI functionality to PCs using Alexa. In May, Lenovo announced Alexa Show Mode exclusively for select Lenovo Yoga, IdeaPad and ThinkPad PCs with Windows 10, with more models planned. Show Mode automatically turns your Lenovo PC into a smart display, so you can ask Alexa to show you trending news stories, listen to music or set a timer from across the room.

That is just one example of how we’ve worked with partners to drive voice technology, but we do in fact have a track record of our own which is evident with Lenovo Voice, which we launched on Lenovo Vantage. Our focus has always been on the use cases unique to Lenovo and our devices, and from there, to work with a range of major players on the wider voice ecosystem.

By teaming up with Amazon, we can focus on new technologies at which we are good at, such as AI on the device, and bring that technology together with Amazon’s expertise around voice recognition, to create the best of both worlds.

Another advantage is that Alexa is familiar to many millions of users of the Alexa-enabled devices, around the world.

However, being on PCs changes a few things from using other Alexa-enabled devices. For a start, it’s much more complex to implement an Alexa Show Mode type of experience on PCs. The operating environment was originally designed long before voice existed.

So, we’ve teamed up with Amazon to address some of these challenges. Security is one example: if your laptop lid is closed, your device is locked and nothing will happen without the right password, your personal face, or some other biometric to unlock it. So how will a PC restart from voice if it’s asleep, and if it’s asleep, how will it recognize your voice?

And power consumption needs to be managed in a new way: if your laptop is continually powering voice recognition software, what will happen to battery management? We are working with our partners to create low-power devices that can wake on voice.

Being heard, being clever

Cool innovations, such as pronunciation assistance, speech recognition and translation, all powered by smart AI will help people to communicate in virtual meetings more easily. There are two parts to this — voice recognition, and the AI back-end.

This is how we will work with devices in the future — and how they will talk back, as well. If you want to surf, browse, or achieve more complex things, you will start to use voice more. The ability to tell a word to become bold in a presentation, or instruct a spreadsheet to put a number in a particular cell or to sum a column of numbers are actions that would be surprisingly easy to do, very effective and quite intuitive.

For the enterprise, use cases are different from the smart home. I don’t see people shouting at their PCs in their office cubicles. It’s simply not a sweet spot use case for voice. But again, if you talk about remote and hybrid work, the ratio between home and work for using voice is changing as we all spend time on calls and out-of-office interactions.

I’ve talked to a lot of companies that were slow at going down the path of using voice — until COVID.

As with everything else, this is about adoption and changing behavior. In an earlier article I talked about connecting all my devices at home and how I felt silly asking my network to do things using voice. It just didn’t feel natural at first.

The same goes for the Alexa Show Mode. I’ve used a number of prototypes of our new PCs with Alexa Show Mode and to start with I felt uncomfortable asking Alexa to play hits of the ’80s (and not because of the music).

And then after a week, I felt more comfortable engaging with Alexa on my PC from a distance or while I was reading a report. I was able to multi-task between work and changing the music I was listening to, all with the power of my voice.

The versatility of Alexa while at home using Show Mode or on the go transformed the way I used my PC.

For Lenovo, adding voice to Lenovo PCs is important because we are increasing the value of the device to the users, in their homes, and in how they use their PCs. We have a dedicated team working on voice inside Lenovo, learning and developing voice interfaces, technology software and applications. It’s one of the core technologies we’re continually exploring.

The future generations of PC operating systems and the apps that will run on them will likely be very different from what we are familiar with today. In years to come, we may laugh at how we used devices today, but getting to that future requires early steps, along what sometimes is a technically difficult path. One of those steps involves voice, and as we endeavor to be a more productive and collaborative society, voice is and always will be at the center.