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If already there were several doubts that the digital assistants – Alexa by Amazon, Assistant by Google and Siri of Apple – were keeping their promises, the annual press release with which Amazon tells how Italians are using Alexa it was the umpteenth and definitive confirmation. Also in 2022, as always in past years, i triumphal tones of the company announcement they seemed almost – and certainly unintentionally – ironic.
Italians have in fact used Alexa for set 800 million alarms and timers and asked 135 million times for the weather forecast. Among the most common uses we also find i memorandum and of course the music requests with which the owners of these devices get on the nerves of anyone in the vicinity (“Alexa put this on! Alexa stop! Alexa turn up the volume!”: incomprehensible behavior, considering the comfort – and discretion – of one smartphones connected to one bluetooth speaker).
Digital helpers
But how? We were promised digital assistants that would eventually bring us get to know you betterable to make themselves useful in a growing number of tasksto autonomously manage our increasingly smart and technological homes – to the point of becoming the inevitable gift of Christmas 2017 – and maybe even of keep company with lonely people and now we end up with a gadget that is only useful for setting the timer and receiving our shouted musical commands?
Of course, the disappointment we received from smart speakers is in good company: in 2022 we should have already been surrounded by autonomous cars which instead seem to be perpetually around the corner and we should have had at the disposal of waiter robots able to do the household chores. None of this materialized. However, if, as regards autonomous cars and robots, it was foreseeable that their comparison with the real world would have been decidedly difficult, it was instead legitimate to expect more from artificial intelligence software who live inside speakers and don’t have to deal with the innumerable unknowns of the physical environments in which we move.
“There was every reason to expect better outcomes in the purely symbolic worlds of information, knowledge and communication – yes law up The Register –. THE big three of voice assistants – Alexa, Assistant and Siri – have been with us for nearly a decade, trained since billions (perhaps trillions) of tiny interactionseach of which was supposed to improve their linguistic models”.
What to do with it?
After Amazon’s announcement that it has suffered billionaire losses due to Alexa and have no idea to base on it a profitable business model (and which therefore goes beyond the simple sale of the device), we can say it without fear: digital assistants are a failure. They don’t get better over time, their usefulness is extremely limited, and I guess I’m not the only one who doesn’t even have a second regret ever buying them, especially since the few times I try to use Siri on the iPhone for something slightly complex (for example, adding an item to an already created shopping list) responds to not be able to (However, it should be noted that Siri is particularly poor).
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