These are handy features, but after a decade of solid investment, you would expect these gadgets to have evolved into something more useful.Īs Microsoft boss Satya Nadella rather smugly put it last month, these voice assistants are “dumb as a rock”.
I use the Google Home devices around my house to stream music and control smart LED lights in each room. Amazon, to its dismay, discovered that people didn’t use Echo to search for and buy things in its massive online store. Unfortunately for Apple, Amazon and Google, what we wanted to know turned out to be obvious stuff, such as the weather forecast for Auckland, or screening times at the local movie theatre. The Big Tech companies that released artificial intelligence-powered, voice-activated assistants received a trove of data yielding insights into what we want to know.
You can buy an Amazon Echo Dot device for about $50. Google Home devices appeared later, in 2016, but Google and Amazon spent vast sums of money subsidising the price of the hardware so they could get the devices into as many homes as possible. Siri, Apple’s voice assistant built into its Mac computers, iPhones, smartwatches and home speakers, has been around since 2011. OPINION: If you’ve had a play with ChatGPT, you probably have a very obvious question: why don’t digital assistants Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant have such advanced conversational skills as the chatbot that has taken the internet by storm?Īfter all, Amazon has had the Alexa Echo voice assistant devices on the market since 2014. Columnist Peter Griffin says the real value, it turns out, is having a chatbot that can be a good conversationalist.
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