> "tl;dr: voice assistants only work well in monolingual families where all of the family members have a perfect accent and where none of your acquaintances min

> "tl;dr: voice assistants only work well in monolingual families where all of the family members have a perfect accent and where none of your acquaintances mind the privacy violations." Indeed, and "perfect accent" varies from device to device. My wife and I are both from the Atlanta, Georgia area, yet we have distinctive accents; hers is much more "Southern" than mine as I grew up in several different states across the Southeast and Southwest, whereas she lived in the same house from birth to college, then moved back after graduating. We've found that her Nexus 6 understands me better than her even though she talks to it far more often than I do, and the reverse is true for our Shield TV despite it using the same backend as the phone. She has to try two or three times to get her phone to understand a command, where I can get it right the first time. On the Shield, I will tell YouTube to look for "funny cat videos" and I get "funny hat videos" every damn time, while she gets cats.