Siri, Ask Alexa To See If Cortana Knows Why Voice Assistants Aren’t All That?
Billions Of Dollars Lost To The Cloud
Recall Amazon’s Dash buttons? They were a handy way to order laundry soap and other basic needs by pushing a button you stuck onto a handy surface, abandoned not long after it’s arrival due to a number of factors including the lack of price information and the love of small children to interact with brightly coloured buttons. From the looks of things, the various voice assistants may be suffering a similar fate.
It is handy to be able to voice your concerns and needs and have something answer you immediately, especially now that the voice assistants have become so well trained as to be able to handle most requests. The problem seems to be the cost of that training and the associated infrastructure, for Amazon is losing billions of dollars every year on Alexa. That is a lot to pay for the convenience of your customers, even for a company such as Amazon.
Things are changing in the market, ChatGPT is certainly making the news lately and it’s open architecture might be able to save the voice assistant in some form but the market as it stands is unlikely to continue. The Register takes a look back at the Knowledge Navigator that never was, and the market as it stands now in this recent opinion piece.
While useful, these activities are such trivial uses of voice assistants you have to wonder why anyone ever bothered – and, in the face of such overwhelming indifference, why vendors continue to throw billions at their development.
