[TeMPOraL]

> This creates a less than stellar experience with the user having to repeat, rephrase or even worse abandon the task.

Not to mention: constant wondering whether the task can even be accomplished. When a voice assistant rejects your query, in many cases you can't be sure whether it's because it couldn't understand you, or because it can't possibly accept what you said as a valid input in the context it's in. In regular interfaces, visible constraints matter as much as affordances.

[barbecue_sauce]

Norman would refer to these constraints as "signifiers", indicators of possible affordances. It's interesting how weak voice assistants are at signifying what you can actually do with them.

[TeMPOraL]

Thanks for introducing me to the term. Damn, I need to finally read that book.

[sizzle]

The dev team can add helpful responses that signify to users the available set of voice commands for tasks it can complete based on keywords it can recognize from a user utterance or simply letting them know they didn't understand their response and they can get a list of actions spoken to them by asking for help. (I've worked on published Alexa skills for several large tech companies.)

I think a cool immersive middle ground will be smart surfaces embedded in wall materials that can display things and will simply list out all actions available or anthropomorphize the smart assistant as like a virtual servant that follows you around serving up facts and doing monotonous IoT actions for you.

Now the privacy and surveillance implications of something like this is another story...

[TeMPOraL]

> Now the privacy and surveillance implications of something like this is another story...

Those would be resolved here and elsewhere if the industry could be made to stop trying to own people's data. It's not the data that should be a commodity, it's software and clouds.