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I question how big the market really is for voice activated personal assistants. Very few people seem to actually want to use them beyond novelty/gimmick. Perso

I question how big the market really is for voice activated personal assistants. Very few people seem to actually want to use them beyond novelty/gimmick. Personally, I would always just prefer to pull out my phone and do whatever I need to do there, it's already insanely convenient and in most cases seems to be superior UX.

quickthrower2 4y ago
I think if it becomes more efficient to use voice people will. Imagine driving and talking to your phone seamlessly getting 10 tasks from your todo list done by talking. Hey bot can you call so and so find out when x is happening and then add it to my calendar please.
- Someone 4y ago
  > Hey bot can you call so and so find out when x is happening. Why would “so and so” be willing to talk to your bot? Chances are they won’t get “so and so”, but so and so’s bot on the line. With the current state of the art, that bot, guided by the question “when will x happen”, may make up that it will happen and make up a date and time, even though it was cancelled last week. Next, your bot might inform the bots of a few friends that the thing is on, book a flight for you to go there, etc. That won’t always happen, of course, but even if it’s a 1:10,000 chance, I wouldn’t take it, as it could be a costly mishap.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Eventually, as a human you wont know if you are talking to their bot!
msh 4y ago
I think its hard to predict given the current quality of voice assistants. I dont think we can answer that until a high quality assistant is availble.
selfhoster11 4y ago
That's because the current crop of voice assistants is dumb as rocks. Siri has good integration with respect to being able to control your phone, but very, very poor NLP. Google Home has the best human language processing and feature set out of the lot. Amazon Echo has... neither, to put it mildly. It's good as a kitchen timer, but that's about it. Once we have assistants that can actually do something useful and specific to your life instead of just setting timers, and looking up what the capital of France is, there would be more demand. I know I'd pay for one, especially if it was open-source and self-hostable.

quickthrower2 4y ago

I think if it becomes more efficient to use voice people will. Imagine driving and talking to your phone seamlessly getting 10 tasks from your todo list done by talking. Hey bot can you call so and so find out when x is happening and then add it to my calendar please.

Someone 4y ago
> Hey bot can you call so and so find out when x is happening. Why would “so and so” be willing to talk to your bot? Chances are they won’t get “so and so”, but so and so’s bot on the line. With the current state of the art, that bot, guided by the question “when will x happen”, may make up that it will happen and make up a date and time, even though it was cancelled last week. Next, your bot might inform the bots of a few friends that the thing is on, book a flight for you to go there, etc. That won’t always happen, of course, but even if it’s a 1:10,000 chance, I wouldn’t take it, as it could be a costly mishap.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Eventually, as a human you wont know if you are talking to their bot!

msh 4y ago

I think its hard to predict given the current quality of voice assistants. I dont think we can answer that until a high quality assistant is availble.

selfhoster11 4y ago

That's because the current crop of voice assistants is dumb as rocks. Siri has good integration with respect to being able to control your phone, but very, very poor NLP. Google Home has the best human language processing and feature set out of the lot. Amazon Echo has... neither, to put it mildly. It's good as a kitchen timer, but that's about it. Once we have assistants that can actually do something useful and specific to your life instead of just setting timers, and looking up what the capital of France is, there would be more demand. I know I'd pay for one, especially if it was open-source and self-hostable.