Let your voice be your guide / ABC Local
Talking to yourself and hearing voices were always considered signs of madness, so what does talking to your device and hearing it talk back to you say about you?
Well it appears it says that you’re bang on trend and maybe you’ve got a thing for Apple’s Siri.
Glynn Greensmith of ABC’s It’s Just Not Cricket wanted to explore all things input, to see what we could get our technology to do for us, without using a keyboard or a mouse and in our chat we set out to see what is possible.
Biometrics were our first port of call, facing recognition, ear recognition, breath, eyes, iris, voice, fingerprints, gait (the way you walk), hand geometry, body odour, signature, typing recognition, vein recognition are just some of the suspects being used and being explored.
The uses of this technology are infinite and range from the opening of applications and programs, to caring for the elderly and infirmed, to driving our covers safely, to health care, to military.
It leads on to the next few tech horizons of big data, internet of things and robots all requiring input devices, all asking us to confirm our identity and all adding to the human-digital chats of tomorrow and beyond.
Have a listen now and without using your keyboard or mouse add your thoughts to the debate.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What does the emergence of voice-activated technology reveal about how people want to interact with information?
The voice-first signal reveals something fundamental about human preference: voice is the most natural and lowest-friction interface humans have. We learn to talk before we learn to read; we navigate social life through conversation; we process information through listening in contexts where reading is impractical (driving, cooking, exercise, accessibility needs). The emergence of voice-activated assistants — Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, now the AI voice interfaces in 2026 — represents not a new behaviour but the technology finally catching up to a deeply human preference. The adoption curve for voice interfaces has been shaped by accuracy (when voice recognition was unreliable, users abandoned it) and capability (when the assistant could only set timers and alarms, the use case was narrow). As both have improved, voice has become a primary interface for a growing proportion of digital interactions.
Q: What are the most important Immediate Futures™ signals for voice technology in 2026?
The voice technology signals arriving now include: AI voice interfaces have crossed the naturalness threshold — conversational AI voices are now indistinguishable from human voices in most contexts, which creates both capability opportunities (more natural interaction) and trust challenges (synthetic voice fraud, deepfake audio); the integration of voice into workplace tools (meeting transcription, voice-to-action in productivity software, voice search in enterprise systems) is mainstream rather than emerging; and the accessibility dimension of voice technology — its value for people with visual impairments, motor difficulties, literacy challenges, or situations where hands and eyes are occupied — remains undercommunicated relative to the consumer novelty angle. Voice is not a gimmick; it is an accessibility tool that happens to be convenient for everyone.
Q: How does the voice technology shift connect to the HUMAND™ framework for understanding human-machine collaboration?
The HUMAND™ framework applied to voice technology reveals: voice interfaces are most valuable when they augment human capability rather than replacing human judgment — the GPS navigator that frees attention for driving safety rather than map-reading is a clear augmentation win; voice-to-action systems that execute commands (set reminders, send messages, search information) handle the routine so humans can focus on the consequential; but the voice interfaces that attempt to replace human conversation (customer service bots designed to pass as human, synthetic voice calls designed to deceive) represent a misapplication of the technology that erodes trust rather than building it. The HUMAND™ question for any voice application is: whose capability does this extend, and whose trust does it require?
Q: How can I book Morris Misel for a voice technology, human-computer interaction, or digital futures keynote?
Contact the booking team at morrismisel.com/event-organisers.
Talking to yourself and hearing voices were always considered signs of madness, so what does talking to your device and hearing it talk back to you say about you? Well it appears it says that you’re bang on trend and maybe you’ve got a thing for Apple’s Siri. Glynn Greensmith of .
When signals like Let your voice be your guide / ABC Local emerge, organisations that engage early have the advantage of choosing their response rather than reacting to events. That gap between those who prepared and those who did not is where competitive positioning is actually made or lost.
The most important question is not whether Let your voice be your guide / ABC Local will matter, but how quickly it will matter in your specific context. Leaders benefit most from mapping the ripple effects early — not just the direct impact but the second and third-order consequences that arrive later and hit harder. That is the practical work of foresight.
