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Alexa and Google Assistant Have a Problem: People Aren't Sticking With Voice Apps They Try (recode.net)
Amazon Echo and Google Home were the breakaway hits of the holiday shopping season. But both devices -- and the voice technologies that power them -- have some major hurdles to overcome if they want to keep both consumers and software developers engaged. From a report on Recode: That's one of the big takeaways from a new report that an industry startup, VoiceLabs, released on Monday. For starters, 69 percent of the 7,000-plus Alexa "Skills" -- voice apps, if you will -- have zero or one customer review, signaling low usage. What's more, when developers for Alexa and its competitor, Google Assistant, do get someone to enable a voice app, there's only a 3 percent chance, on average, that the person will be an active user by week 2, according to the report. (There are outliers that have week 2 retention rates of more than 20 percent.) For comparison's sake, Android and iOS apps have average retention rates of 13 percent and 11 percent, respectively, one week after first use. "There are lots of [voice] apps out there, but they are zombie apps," VoiceLabs co-founder Adam Marchick said in an interview.
It can also require you to be careful how you pronounce the request, and the exact phrasing you use. The devices may advertise themselves as "natural language" interaction, but understanding a phrase when pauses for commas and such come into play, or overcoming the speaker's personal accent or speech issues isn't that easy..
Voice control is still too unreliable for me. About half the times I try to use it, I end up repeating myself with different variations, trying to get the exact right phrasing it wants. I usually end up having to do it manually anyway. I might as well just skip those step and go right to the finger.
When it works right the first time, it's like magic, but that is so rare.