[empath75]

The problem with all the original iterations on these assistants is that they fail so often that people stop using them for anything except for the few things that they can do reliably which for most people is basically setting timers, playing music and turning the lights off and on.

They're annoying to use, because the interface sort of implies affordances (like, you know, just talking to it like a person) that aren't actually available, and really it's just a menu tree that's barely more sophisticated than a customer support call tree.

[ultrarunner]

In a situation with such a low margin of value for the user, there's an even finer point on reducing friction. I know Alexa stopped being used in my household shortly after the "by the way…" addendums were introduced. This seemed to be in recognition of the trend of reduction to memorized phrases, but it was a bad approach. If the other comments are true, and incremental progress was more rewarded, it stands to reason that such a major problem with the service was under appreciated. Had it been recognized as the dead-end of the product, maybe more sophisticated models would have been pursued.

[ghaff]

Right. You develop a small number of simple, useful, common tasks and you pretty much just stick to those.

[tssva]

My guess is that there is going to be all this investment and research poured into AI voice assistants and in the end the result is going to be the same.

[danielbln]

What makes you guess that?

[tssva]

Because to date I haven’t seen anything that doesn’t appear to be a solution in search of a problem.