[ghaff]

>That's because you interact with it as though it is a person

Well, that was sort of the pitch and it's certainly implied by "virtual/voice assistant." Certainly Amazon wasn't pitching Alexa as a voice-operated kitchen timer. To be honest, I'm probably better with them now because I know they mostly don't work but can be used for some simple tasks for which I know an incantation that mostly gives me the result I want.

[jacquesm]

Fair enough, but anybody that knows more about this stuff than your average consumer was likely quite skeptical of that pitch. All I saw was an always on microphone with a line to Apple, Google or Amazon and for me that was reason enough to bar that stuff from crossing the threshold at the front door here.

[ghaff]

>anybody that knows more about this stuff than your average consumer was likely quite skeptical of that pitch.

That probably was--or should have been the case. But it's one of those things that seems like it would be pretty straightforward. After all, if a fairly young child can do something, it seems like a computer wired up to the Internet could. And in fact, voice recognition has gotten quite good--at least for English speakers without a strong accent. But actually carrying on a conversation in natural language is a really hard problem, even if children can do so from a fairly young age.