At Microsoft, whose chief executive Satya Nadella declared in 2016 that “bots are the new apps”, it is now acknowledged that voice assistants, including its own Cortana, did not live up to the hype.
“They were all dumb as a rock,” Nadella told the Financial Times last month. “Whether it’s Cortana or Alexa or Google Assistant or Siri, all these just don’t work. We had a product that was supposed to be the new front-end to a lot of [information] that didn’t work.”
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ChatGPT’s ability to understand complex instructions left existing voice assistants looking comparatively stupid, said Adam Cheyer, the co-creator of Siri
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A voice assistant revival may come from generative AI, which could help make them much smarter than they are today.
“It’s causing buzz,” said the current Amazon employee about tools such as ChatGPT. “There was a directive that came down from some [executives] to have teams brainstorm what it would look like for Alexa to be more intelligent.”
It is great to see more acknowledgment of something that has frustrated me since the introduction of ChatGPT late last year.
Thankfully, the introduction of the new ChatGPT API means that it is now possible another company might get a jump start on making a truly intelligent voice assistant a reality.