TiVo will provide voice search capability for Sky Q, the companies said in a Wednesday announcement. Sky users will be able to search for content by voice on linear TV and VOD, they said. The solution is built into TiVo’s knowledge graph engine that’s capable of understanding trends and conversations, said TiVo. The knowledge base, updated continuously via data ingestion and news crawlers, is produced and curated by content editors, predictive search results and behavioral indicators from social networks, TiVo said.

The adoption rate of smart speakers with voice assistants grew from 5 percent of U.S. broadband homes in Q4 2015 to 12 percent in Q4 2016, said a Parks Associates report Tuesday. Some 56 percent of consumers want to use voice-activated personal assistants to control smart home devices, similar to the percentage (55 percent) who want to use them to control entertainment devices, said Parks, which estimates 15.3 million Amazon Echo devices were sold in 2016. Voice interfaces are advancing due to “continued improvements in machine learning and natural language processing,” and their implementation in portable devices, said analyst Dina Abdelrazik. Amazon’s Alexa has taken the “clear lead” in the category since Apple’s Siri launch in 2011, Abdelrazik said. "Adoption for voice assistants will increase as these devices add more and varied capabilities to match the many use cases possible in the smart home and IoT," Abdelrazik said. The Alexa Skills Kit has grown about 40 percent since January 2016, recently topping 10,000 skills, and Amazon plans to release new Alexa devices that also can make phone calls and work as intercoms, she said. Google Home, meanwhile, countered by adding its Google Express delivery network for home shopping. Parks plans a session on voice assistants at its Connections conference in San Francisco May 23-25.

Amazon built incentives into the cost model for its Alexa developer program to extend free compute time for building and hosting Alexa skills using Amazon Web Services, said the company Wednesday. Currently, developers using the AWS free tier receive up to 750 hours of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud compute time per month at no charge but incur usage charges if they exceed the free-tier limits. Under the new program, developers with a published Alexa skill can apply to receive a $100 AWS promotional credit and also can receive an additional $100 per month in AWS promotional credits if they incur AWS usage charges for their skill, it said. The program is designed so that popular skills that hit more than 1 million calls per month are cost-effective to maintain, it said.

Amazon’s acknowledgment of a glitch with the Alexa voice assistant Tuesday night into Wednesday was far less detailed than social media comments chronicling the snafu. We first noticed the brownout when we summoned Alexa for the weather forecast; while our Echo lit up to indicate it was listening, Alexa didn’t respond to requests for the weather, a joke or the news. Far more connected Alexa users lost control of lights and more, we found from social media posts. Twitter user Kunai Bajaj wondered if the Alexa outage was related to the Amazon Web Services disruption last week. Facebook user Howie Cooperstein blamed a failed software update for “connected but useless” Alexa Echo devices. A friend weighed in saying his Echo speaker wouldn’t control the lights but did play music. Twitter user AndrewChoy thought the outage might be a political statement and said: “Ok @amazon, supporting #adaywithoutwomen is noble but taking Alexa offline is a bit much." Many Alexa users took the hitch in stride. Said Twitter user Andrew Lee: “Fine, I'll turn off the lights myself." In response to our questions on what happened, what caused the flameout and how many devices were affected, an Amazon spokeswoman only emailed us: "Yesterday evening we had an issue that impacted some Alexa customers’ ability to interact with the service. The Alexa service is now operating normally.”

Yale Locks' ZigBee and Z-Wave-enabled Real Living deadbolts are now compatible with Amazon Alexa when used with Samsung SmartThings and Wink hubs, said Yale Wednesday. Users can issue commands telling Alexa to lock a door or give status of a lock, but the device won’t unlock with voice commands for security reasons, said the company. Yamaha also announced Alexa voice control capability for more than 40 MusicCast multiroom AV products via a firmware update.

Smart speaker shipments, reaching 5.9 million units globally in 2016, will grow 10 times by 2022, driven by improved speech recognition accuracy, compelling use cases and multilanguage support, said a Strategy Analytics report Monday. Smart speaker revenue is forecast to reach $1.5 billion this year and $5.5 billion in 2022, it said. Amazon's Echo product line dominates the market, but competition is set to heat up this year as Google Home enters its first full year of sales and other Wi-Fi speaker manufacturers begin to build microphones and virtual assistant platform-compatibility into products, the research firm said. Conversational, hands-free interaction with the internet is “very compelling,” Strategy Analytics analyst David Watkins said. Although early smart speakers have “obvious limitations,” future versions will deliver new use cases such as voice calling, travel planning, remote learning and healthcare services, Watkins said. Advances in voice biometrics and voice authentication “will help ease privacy concerns and make the devices more adaptable to multi-user environments,” Watkins said. Adoption across different markets will depend on integration of localized services with the relevant voice platform and “near-human levels of accuracy” with speech recognition and contextual understanding, the analyst said. With Amazon’s $50 Dot device already an “impulse" buy, cost isn’t expected to be a barrier to entry, analyst Bill Ablondi said. Attractive pricing will drive adoption of the technology beyond the tech-savvy customer, but compelling use cases will have to emerge to “ensure that these devices do not end up collecting dust after an initial period of experimentation,” Ablondi said.

CEVA and Waves Audio are collaborating on far-field voice pickup and psychoacoustic enhancement solutions for mobile, smart home and wireless audio markets, they said in a Tuesday announcement. Waves’ MaxxVoice is said to improve speech recognition in far-field voice applications while using far-field voice pickup and barge-in capabilities using acoustic echo cancellation. MaxxAudio is designed for louder sound with more bass, they said. “Voice is becoming a primary interface to control and interact, requiring advanced algorithms and processors to deliver a seamless experience," said Tomer Elbaz, Waves general manager-consumer electronics. The company’s technology with CEVA’s audio/voice digital signal processor offers an embedded solution for a low-power audio or voice-enabled platform, he said.

Sony’s new line of smart TVs incorporating Google Assistant “is a harbinger of things to come,” and the TV industry will have to figure out its stance in a world where Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft dominate the voice-controlled visual assistant market, The Diffusion Group (TDG) Senior Adviser Joel Espelien said in a TDG blog post Wednesday. TDG said the Sony/Google partnership puts TV original equipment manufacturers and multichannel video programming distributors “in a difficult position,” with three options: develop their own voice search capabilities, coalesce around Google as the industry standard search engine, or divide up teams and align with one or more of the voice assistants. TDG was dismissive of Comcast’s development of voice search capabilities for its X1 platform: “Voice search limited to a single service (or device) is a classic stovepipe solution” since consumers want to “search for anything across any service.” Coalescing around Google levels the search playing field among legacy participants but hands Google “the keys to the $70 billion US TV advertising market,” TDG said. Teams of OEMs and multichannel video programming distributors aligning with various voice assistants seem inevitable, it said, with one result being content providers would have big incentives to provide application programming interface support to all the voice assistants.

Roughly half of U.S. broadband homes want the ability to monitor and adjust thermostats remotely, and a third find voice control very appealing, said a Parks Associates report Tuesday. Voice control is “transforming the smart home user experience” and offering a way for companies to expand consumer engagement with their services and solutions, said Parks analyst Patrice Samuels. In the past six months, 2-4 percent of U.S. broadband households purchased an Echo, said Parks, saying both the Echo and Google Home have the ability to drive adoption of multiple smart home and energy management products. The research firm scheduled a panel, “Leveraging Voice Control and AI in Energy Management,” at its Smart Energy Summit next week in Austin.

Amazon’s Alexa received two more endorsements Tuesday, for car-based voice control by Logitech and for home control in the U.K. by Control4. Logitech ZeroTouch car mount owners will be able to control their smartphone and smart home devices at home by voice, said a Logitech announcement. In the car, drivers can use the ZeroTouch to change their home thermostat, turn on lights, listen to a Kindle book and lock a front door, said Logitech. Via an Android app, ZeroTouch can also read out and respond to emails, accept or decline calendar invites, and announce calendar meetings for the day, said the CE company. The mounts are $59 for the air vent version, $79 for the dashboard mount. Control4’s Alexa integration allows U.K. customers to manage by voice Control4’s more than 10,000 devices and scenes. A bedtime scene could turn off all connected devices such as lights and TVs, lock doors and set back the thermostat, said Control4. The Alexa Skill requires a 79-euro (about $84) annual Control4 4Sight subscription.