[nopriorarrests]

>they mean that it was uncommon for a typical consumer to experience it back then.

Siri from Apple was launched in 2011, as some other commenter noted below. Also, "On June 14, 2011, Google announced at its Inside Google Search event that it would start to roll out Voice Search on Google.com during the coming days".

If it does not count as 'typical consumer to experience it', well, I do not know what counts then.

9 years ago, I mind you, not 5. And I think that 5 years ago voice recognition was more-or-less good already. In 4 years both Apple and Google acquired large enough datasets to learn from, afer initial launch of their products in 2011.

What we are still struggling with is proccesing of fuzzy queries, something among the lines of 'Siri tell me which restaurant in my area serves the most delicious sushi according to yelp reviews and also allows takeout', but this is not a voice recognition problem (though typical consumer can think it is).

[lostlogin]

> ‘Siri tell me which restaurant in my area serves the most delicious sushi according to yelp reviews and also allows takeout’

Siri stumbles at way less complex queries than that. Every year or so I retry using it, and give up due to the error rate. An accuracy of 99% and 10x slower is apparently preferable for me.

[Talanes]

My experience has been very different. I use an Alexa purely to control lights and set alarms, and have enough misses at just those tasks that I don't consider it particularly good at them.

I'd take a literal clapper that hooked into smartbulbs over it at this point.