Why Big Tech's bet on AI assistants is so risky
Tech companies have not solved some of the persistent problems with AI language models.
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Amazon is losing money on basic voice assistant, but maybe if they make it more expensive , it will become profitable ?
I mean, that’s a little like asking, “How many swift kicks to my nuts before it makes me a billionaire?”
Because it’s one of those cost evaluation situations where they thought it was a shot in the dark at first, but by now it’s clearly a loss. So, the whole thing feels a little like, The Producer’s, something isn’t smelling right for any outsiders.
Alexa is trash and its entire implementation is trash. I’ve tried it with a smart home and it’s a nightmare.
It's...okay. What is garbage is that after billions of dollars spent, it has barely improved in the last 5 years. In some cases gotten worse.
And don't get me started on Siri.
However, if Alexa/Siri had integrated with ChatGPT instead of Wolfram Alpha and "Amazon contributors" I might feel somewhat different. The info would definitely not be less reliable.
I switched from Android to iPhone a few years ago. I still miss Google Assistant so much. 😬
The part that kills me is that Siri was (effectively) first. They had probably 2 years' lead on everyone else. Somehow they squandered that - pretty quickly - fell behind, and in some ways got WORSE. And it's been 12 years.
The one thing Siri has above all else is being local where possible. Personally I thought one of the biggest announcements from last month’s Apple event was that the new watch is powerful enough to do voice processing locally.
Of course that also may be one of the reasons Siri lags the cloud voice assistants
That does sound good.
It would be nice for all these things to be a lot more local. At least local control things should be able to be done without a cloud service.
