In 2020, it was estimated that around 276 million homes around the world had had smart speakers installed.
That figure is expected to rise to 381 million by 2024.
China and the United States are the two most popular markets for sales of smart speakers.
Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri and Google Assistant are the two most popular brands.
Understandably, though, the capacity of smart speakers to enable companies to listen into conversations in their customers' homes has raised major concerns about privacy issues, with reports that contractors are being paid to gather information amassed from them and other devices.
Questions have also been raised about Amazon's willingness to hand over user data to law enforcement, with human rights activists concerned about the implications of all that for state surveillance.
Against this backdrop, director Steven Soderbergh has decided to weigh into the debate with a timely thriller 'Kimi' starring Zoe Kravitz.
Shot by him yet again using an iPhone, 'Kimi'is a tense, contemporary COVID era suspense thriller with shades of Hitchcock, De Palma, Pakula, Reichert and Coppola.
Kravitz plays Angela Childs, an employee of a Seattle based tech corporation Amygdala which is marketing a next generation smart speaker called Kimi.
At the start of the film, the company's CEO, Derek DelGaudio's Bradley Hasling is giving an interview to a cable news business show about his plans for a public offering to potential investors.
However it quickly becomes clear in a phone call after the interview that Hasling is edgy about anything that could endanger the flotation.
As he frets, Angela works from her apartment, monitoring snippets of audio from customers' devices that are referred to her by Amygdala as suspicious or raising issues that require immediate resolution.
As a result of the COVID pandemic, Angela has become agoraphobic.
Romantically involved with Byron Bowers' neighbour Terry from an apartment block across the street, she tries to arrange a date at a food truck but cannot bring herself to venture out her padlocked door.
Another neighbour from the apartment block opposite, Devin Ratray's Kevin also seems glued to his apartment window watching the comings and goings of the neighbourhood through binoculars.
From time to time, Terry calls over to her apartment where they have sex but he wants a more conventional romantic relationship.
Angela also from time to time Facetimes her mum, played by Robin Givens, who tries to encourage her to pluck up the courage and experience the world outside the apartment.
One day during work, Angela is sent an audio clip with heavy rock music that disturbs her.
Using equipment to dial down the music and augment other sounds, the audio appears to indicate the owner of the Kimi device has been subjected to a rape.
With the help of Alex Dobrenko's co-worker Darius, Angels illicitly accesses more audio from the Kimi device of the owner, Erika Christensen's Samantha.
Going through the files, she is disturbed to hear audio of Samantha being murdered and her body removed from her apartment.
Alerting her employers, she is put in touch with Rita Wilson's executive Natalie Chowdhury who asks her to come into the office so they can listen to the audio before handing it over to the FBI.
Plucking up the courage to step outside the apartment and make her way across Seattle to the company headquarters, Angela is anxious for the FBI to be given the audio which she has recorded on a flash drive.
Samantha, however, was Bradley Hasling's mistress and it soon becomes evident that Amygdala will stop at nothing to cover this up.
Hasling employs Jaime Camil's Antonio Rivas and his goons, played by Jacob Vargas and Charles Halford, to silence Angela, recover the USB stick and eliminate all the recordings.
'Kimi' is a glorious 21st Century twist on the post Kennedy assasination conspiracy thriller.
There are shades of Alan Pakuka's 1974 corporate corruption and assassination yarn 'The Parallax View' with Warren Beatty and William Reichert's darkly comic1979 paranoid thriller 'Winter Kills'.
However the films that audiences will most be reminded of watching are Francis Coppola's gripping 1974 surveillance tale 'The Conversation' with Gene Hackman and Brian de Palma's 1981 thriller 'Blow Out' with John Travolta which both rely on disturbing audio to propel a murder mystery and fuel their viewers' paranoia.
Visually and thematically, there are elements too of Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 classic 'Rear Window', with the framing of the apartment block opposite and its heroine confined for a large part of the film to her own apartment.
There's a nice echo too of Danny Boyle's 1994 Edinburgh morality tale 'Shallow Grave' in its climatic moments but you can judge for yourself if that is intentional.
Soderbergh and his screenwriter David Koepp have stitched together an absorbing contemporary thriller tgat raises questions about the kind of society we have become and the ethics of the tech giants as they have grown more powerful.
It helps that Kravitz is an engaging screen presence but she is also ably supported by DelGaudio, Camil, Vargas and Halford as the villains of the piece.
Rita Wilson also does a sterling job as a front for corporate cover-up and corruption, while for the brief moments when she appears Christiansen conveys the terror her character is subjected to.
While not effectively a one man band these days, Soderbergh neverthelezz has a huge say over the look and pace of the film - shooting it on an iPhone and editing it under his pseudonyms Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard.
And just like his 2018 psychological horror tale 'Unsane,' his 2019 sports drama 'High Flying Bird' and his 2021 film noir thriller 'No Sudden Move,' the movie benefits from his singular vision.
Every image is artfully constructed and impressively lit.
Soderbergh moves the iPhone camera with great panache, sweeping around Angela's apartment.
He also uses handheld devices to amp up the sense of danger as she wanders through the streets of Seattle.
The camera angles he deploys to shoot Amygdala's headquarters strip away the corporate veneer to reveal something much more disturbing.
At a running time just shy of 90 minutes, it is also a pacy affair that never overstays its welcome.
Not everything is perfect - occasionally Bowers' and Givens' performances are a little stiff, although Ratray and Dobrenko are great as their characters get increasingly sucked into events.
However there's no denying that 'Kimi' is yet another exciting, boundary pushing venture from Soderbergh who continues to demonstrate what can be achieved using smartphone technology.
Whether in the age of Mark Zuckerberg's Meta and the growing power of Amazon, 'Kimi' sparks a proper, impassioned debate about the growing influence and control of tech giants remains to be seen.
But it is also a wonderful example to other filmmakers of how to make a slick, effective, low budget thriller,
('Kimi' was released on HBO Max in the United States on February 10, 2022 and on Sky Cinema and NOWTV in the UK and Ireland on February 18, 2022)
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