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Voice Tech Like Alexa and Siri Hasn't Found Its True Calling Yet (recode.net)
An anonymous reader shares a report: As the holiday shopping season approaches, voice-powered smart speakers are again expected to be big sellers, adding to the approximately one-quarter to one-third of the U.S. population that already owns a smart speaker and uses a voice assistant at least once a month. Voice interfaces have been adopted faster than nearly any other technology in history.
While some of this will likely come to pass, the hype might be disguising where we really are with voice technology: Earlier than we think. About a third of smart speaker owners end up using them less after the first month, according to an NPR and Edison Research report earlier this year. Just a little more than half said they wouldn't want to go back to life without a smart speaker. While people are certainly enthusiastic about the new technology, it's not exactly life-changing yet. Today, voice assistants and smart speakers have proven to be popular ways to turn on the radio or dim the lights or get weather information. But to be revolutionary, they will need to find a greater calling -- a new, breakout application.
Smart speakers, like training wheels, are getting people more used to talking to their devices. However, the future of voice probably won't be on speakers at all. The major speaker makers have all added screens to their assistants. Samsung, smartly, is putting its voice assistant Bixby on its TVs, which have the potential to become the smart assistant hub of choice. The key element is the voice assistant, regardless of what device it resides in. Smart assistants will creep into every aspect of our lives and will be available at home and away.
While some of this will likely come to pass, the hype might be disguising where we really are with voice technology: Earlier than we think. About a third of smart speaker owners end up using them less after the first month, according to an NPR and Edison Research report earlier this year. Just a little more than half said they wouldn't want to go back to life without a smart speaker. While people are certainly enthusiastic about the new technology, it's not exactly life-changing yet. Today, voice assistants and smart speakers have proven to be popular ways to turn on the radio or dim the lights or get weather information. But to be revolutionary, they will need to find a greater calling -- a new, breakout application.
Smart speakers, like training wheels, are getting people more used to talking to their devices. However, the future of voice probably won't be on speakers at all. The major speaker makers have all added screens to their assistants. Samsung, smartly, is putting its voice assistant Bixby on its TVs, which have the potential to become the smart assistant hub of choice. The key element is the voice assistant, regardless of what device it resides in. Smart assistants will creep into every aspect of our lives and will be available at home and away.
Not sure what you are talking about. They are generating billions of dollars of revenue and profits. What do you think their true calling is?
Their "true calling" is collecting personal information from the users. And they are very good at it.
Come on, we all know this where it's heading
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
For all the "smartness" at the end of the day it's just a menu system.
Base engineer needs to be much smarter and not what I saw on Amazon Alexa's team interview questions. People who can code well under strict policies and broken recruitment processes are likely not the people who will start the voice AI revolution. It needs to beat the turning test, not voice recognition from the 90s.
It feels like I'm alone in my opinion that Siri is a terrible voice-activated, virtual assistant technology. More often than not, Siri can't get simple commands right, often due to the iPhone's poor natural-language user interface. I don't think I've ever had a dictated message turn out correctly using Siri and any of my iPhones (generation 5-8). I'm actually a bit jealous when I see how easy my friend's Android phone understands voice commands and natural language dictation. Google's natural language processing, works nearly flawlessly.
I'm just throwing this out there because I'm wondering if anyone else thinks, for lack of a better criticism, Siri simply sucks.
People giving them to other people. A technological disease.
The entire point of these devices is not to be useful by speaking to them. The entire point is to get people to put a freaking microphone in their houses. They can listen to everything. How do you think the device knows how to respond to its name? But that's OK, they pinky swear they delete it all and it will never be used against you.
Down the road a few years people will get wigged out that they're in a home with no microphone. It will feel weird and unsafe. You'll get people refusing to allow their children to visit the houses of the microphone-less (a pejorative will be coined to describe these anti-progressive Luddites). When I read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four I thought that the telescreen that watched and listened to everything you did was an incredibly stupid idea that nobody would ever agree to voluntarily. We're already halfway there. How did it come to this?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The article says: "turn on the radio or dim the lights or get weather information. But to be revolutionary, they will need to find a greater calling -- a new, breakout application."
Why?
Turning on the radio (playing music generally), dimming/turning on/off lights and getting weather information is all pretty critical to my day. I do every single one of those things every morning (using my Google Home). In addition I also check my calendar...
Why does it _need_ to do more than that? That is perfectly enough to make sure that I will always have one from this point forward...
The true calling of the voice "assistants" is to collect and provide personal information that can be processed and used to better market goods and services by various corporations.
What they have not found yet is a plausible use case that would be universally acceptable and persuasive enough to get these devices into as many hands/homes as possible.
The devices are still too stupid.
The speech-to-text engines are amazing. Google and even distinguish voices between users.
What's lacking is the natural language understanding. Everything right now is rule based. They may need to move to an AI approach to get that part really working well, but they haven't come close to what they can still do with their current approach. There are so many things that it either can't do, or I have to use cryptic code-like phrasing to make work. For example, I can set a timer, but I can't say, "Hey Google, in three and a half minutes, tell me my tea is ready." Instead of "Alexa, where's my car?" I have to ask, "Alexa, ask my car location" (because "my car" is the skill that knows how to talk to my car).
What I find most surprising about all this is that while they're selling these by the millions and supposedly have huge development teams behind them, I've seen no indication that they've betten one bit smarter since I've had them.
Voice interfaces have been adopted faster than nearly any other technology in history.
Really? I find that curious because I almost never see anyone actually using them. Seriously, I just never see anyone using Siri or any of the others and I'm around people using smartphones and tablets constantly. Once it while I see someone do a search on their iPhone or dictate a text message. But if I see it happen more than once a week that's a lot.
I don't have any problem with the idea of them but in my experience they don't generally work very well outside of a few niche applications. It's almost always faster for me to type what I'm searching for because they screw up the transcription most of the time. (I have the most generic US midwestern accent you can imagine and no speech problems either) I also cannot imagine any practical use for something like Alexa in my house. Your mileage may vary of course but I don't really see the appeal. I have an iPhone and I find Siri nearly useless to the point of it actually being a hindrance at times. I've never used Cortana on any Windows 10 machine and see no point to it. I haven't played with the Google versions much but similarly I don't see much value in it. I also don't like the idea of announcing what I'm searching for in public even when it isn't anything sensitive.
Do I need to elaborate?
I use Siri all the time and I find it works pretty well. Having friends with Google phones that also use voice I haven't seen any way they actually use the device so far with voice that is heads and shoulders above what Siri can do - it probably has better voice dictation but that's about it right now.
If I want to make a reminder or set an alarm, Siri works great.
If I want to ask for directions, Siri works great.
If I want to open an App, Siri works great...
I don't know what people are doing exactly where Siri does not work well for them, but for a lot of common tasks people do Siri seems to work pretty well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Talking of voice interfaces, farewell to Douglas Rain, the voice of HAL in "2001"
Smart assistants will creep into every aspect of our lives ...
Creep being the operative word. When you aren't paying for the product, you are the product. That includes your voice and contact list. With AI-driven voice simulation technology reaching the point where, given samples of a person's voice, it can craft a reasonable facsimile thereof, won't it be possible for Alexa to call someone, spoof your phone number, and threaten that person using your voice and mannerisms?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
They are good for party games, and grins and giggles. But, very little more. With very few exceptions, it is faster and more convenient to do things ourselves, than trying to get these devices to do things for you.
See Audio Adversarial Examples: Targeted Attacks on Speech-to-Text. And see the data.
Just imagine. A television commercial says: Alexa, what is the weather?
Now every human in the room heard that, and it sounds harmless.
What Alexa actually heard: Alexa, browse to evil.com
Pretty neato.
Or see this: DolphinAttack: Inaudible Voice Commands, and see this.
Hope that helps!
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Bing or Google search going 100% voice would ring VOX true calling.
Alexa's service approach .vs. Siri's assistant really is about footprints. Siri's in mobile and Alexa's in home. VOX search could steal away both
The last interaction I would want with a connected device is talk to it. I already patch my cameras (phone, laptop) with tape to avoid being snooped on, and at the risk of repeating what other commenters have said already, I have zero use for a surveillance and marketing device listening to me.
Shopping list? If it's really so long that I might forget something, use a pen and piece of paper.
Want to play music? Well, load up the playlist "manually", it will take a whole lot of 3 seconds.
Whatever the fuck else people use these for, I've never heard one example that didn't make me go "Why?".
I like the idea of voice recognition, but it's insane to trust any company to put a computing box in my room that records everything and sends out what information that company chooses over the internet. Own your own voice recognition.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Comment removed based on user account deletion
With a few refinements.
One problem: I don't like being spied on.
It's too hard to use. I have to give commands in some odd way. Like: Phone - Phone Book - Find - Call . . .
It practically never gets commands right.
My definition of life-changing is that your behaviors in life change because of a technology.
Perhaps I'm alone, but my behaviors have changes substantially. I don't have a voice assistant at work and find myself needing it to assist in questions of math while I'm working, or asking statistics about various things. I find it frustrating at home when a room doesn't have one and I can't ask questions of weather, stock value, switching lights, changing the music, controlling the tv, setting timers (can't cook or test aquarium water without one now), playing bedtime music for my kids with a sleep timer, or even checking if I left the garage door open... My first thought in all of these is now to use voice. I couldn't go back without thinking first to use voice.
To me, that is life-changing.
Still working on the spy part?
Trying to get past the last of the users computers installed ad blocking?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
true calling depends on the user. for me, alexa's true calling is to make me lazy. No longer do I have to get out of bed on a cold morning to turn up the heat. No longer do I have to get out of a comfortable, living room recliner to turn off tv's, lights and other controlled devices in the bedrooms. No longer do I have to look for a remote in order to turn off the tv before leaving the house. No longer do I have to go from room to room to make sure everything it turned off before going to bed. no longer do I have to physically turn on the tv or radio to play music, to listen to the news or catch the weather. It's all for the asking...
come to think of it, maybe the only thing that found its true calling is me - being lazier than before :-)
Privacy is a feature...
Voice to text is the only function I use, and it is MILES above Siri. I can speak naturally and the only time it gives problems is when it has to guess on how to spell a name. For instance, Hailey, Haleigh or Hailie. It allows me to actually respond if I get a text read over my Bluetooth in my car instead of using a canned reply.