[mrweasel]

> I assumed that both Amazon and Google were underwhelmed by how much actual revenue these kinds of devices produced, so they were starving the backend services.

For years I've been questioning the usefulness of voice assistants and have been mostly ridiculed for it. Beyond a few edge cases, like setting a timer when cooking or use in cars, I still don't see people actually using them all that much. So I'd agree that the potential revenue was vastly overestimate, nor are the lack of a powerful voice assistant going to hurt sales of devices such as phones. The devices which can only be used as a voice assistant is going to go away obviously.

[ghaff]

The issue is really in the "assistant" term. Their voice recognition is good enough for English speaking people without heavy accents. But they're terrible actual assistants beyond some rote command relative to all but the most dim-witted human.

[mrweasel]

That's a good point, but the industry would never have been able to hype "voice commands" to the same levels or justify the spending.