[sparkpeasy]

What do people actually use voice for besides playing music, smart home, transcribing and "widget" stuff like timers and weather?

Are there lots of people out there actually using it for productivity like scheduling, communicating, researching, comparing?

To me it seems like until voice AI gets smart enough to respond to a query like "Alexa, how will our Q4 projected net profits change if I switch widget vendors from AlphaCorp to BetaCorp?" an interactive screen will be needed.

[yourapostasy]

Companies see the Cambrian explosions of growth (and equities appreciation) that follow successful UI shifts and want to reproduce that with voice UI.

You could do a hell of a lot by establishing a framework for third parties to use such that they don’t stomp upon each other and the system-reserved words/phrases, as well as homophone rejection/discrimination, then brute-forcing lots of recognized cases. Right now, I’m seeing second-system effects in voice UI efforts by everyone (possibly excepting the dedicated voice recognition outfits like Nuance), by trying to apply a general machine learning approach to all of it and eschewing brute-force as not pure/clean enough.

[jxdxbx]

Well, Alexa seems to be going the brute force route--using third-party skills is just like using a spoken command line utility. The problem is, while this approach is simple and it works, very few skills are useful.