[throwaway5752]

"Cortana is an analytics and telemetry app that data mines people while pretending to be a digital assistant"

I am stunned that anyone here believes that any of the digital assistants are anything other than data ingestion and analysis vehicles.

[shajznnckfke]

Owning a web search box is valuable because you have customers coming to you making some request that can often be satisfied by the sale of a product or service. It’s the perfect advertising opportunity - much more effective than throwing ads at customers that aren’t actively looking for your product. That’s why Google makes the big bucks. It’s also why Goggle pays Apple billions for the privilege of answering queries in the iOS search box - so it can sell ads on that traffic. And this is why Google had to make Android, so they don’t have to pay for all mobile search usage. Also, Amazon is now making billions selling ads on the Amazon product search traffic. There are other uses for the data from search intent, but none of it generates cash like directly selling ads on those searches.

Now apply this context to the voice assistant market. If computer interactions shift from the web to voice, the digital assistant is the new search box. Being the company who creates the leading digital assistant means you’re in the position of getting paid billions for that traffic, rather than paying billions to get it.

In short, I think the idea that voice assistants must exist to obtain new kinds of data misses the point. The creators of these services are going to want to collect data to train models, to debug, etc. but it’s all a means to an end. The end is to put a troll toll in place to extract a chunk of the value of any economic activity organized through the voice assistant. Imagine if AT&T could collect a tax on the value of any service sold over the phone - that’s the kind of economic opportunity we are talking about here. There’s no need to search for other hidden motivations.

Of course, other entities like governments would actually like the ability to listen to all your conversations, so they are going to try to get ahold of this data too.