Apple presented Siri, the first voice assistant, on October 4, 2011. Ten years later, where are we? To find out, we confronted the main “artificial intelligences” in a video. Are they finally useful?
A few months ago, voice assistants celebrated their tenth anniversary. It is more precisely Siri which blew its tenth candle, Apple was indeed one step ahead of the competition. Its voice assistant, launched with the iPhone 4S, was the first capable of responding with real sentences to its interlocutor, which amazed everyone at the time. Of course, the 2011 Siri had limitations. If it was very good at giving us the weather, starting a timer or making a phone call, the rest of its features were quite limited.
Ten years later, where are we? In 2017 and 2018 in France, Google and Amazon embarked on the adventure with Google Assistant (which some call “OK Google”) and Alexa. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of voice assistants, Numerama had the idea of asking a few questions to a HomePod mini, a Google Nest Audio, an Amazon Echo Dot… and a Huawei smartphone with the Celia assistant. This is followed by a reflection on the future of intelligent assistants.
“Start a timer and play music”
Our observation in this video (and in life more generally, we ourselves are users of these three assistants) is that the progress of voice assistants is too weak in ten years. While there have been quite a few improvements in understanding, the functionality of Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa has been pretty much the same from the start. We ask our voice assistants for the time, to start a timer, to tell us the weather, to put on music or to turn devices off and on.
For more complex questions, there are sometimes good surprises (especially on the years when events happened)… but that’s about all. Most of the major advancements in voice assistants, like the ability to ask multiple questions in a single sentence, are reserved for English-language versions. It’s disappointing not to be able to say “Play some music and turn off the light” to a voice assistant without bugging it.
Another unfortunate thing, which repeat users of Google Assistant, Siri or Alexa know, connection problems are still too common. Inability to connect to the music service, Internet connection problems, answers in the wrong language… Voice assistants have youthful flaws despite their age.
Who has the best assistant?
This is a difficult question. In our opinion, each assistant has its particularities. For music, for example, Apple excels. Even if its HomePods are not compatible with Spotify, the brand’s iPhone assistant understands the different requests very well. For questions of general knowledge, Google Assistant and Alexa do better.
More generally, it all depends on your needs and habits. Some logical sentences don’t work with an assistant, but may work with others. Ten years later, this technology still gives us the impression of being too young, even if it is present everywhere. Let’s hope that the next ten years will be even richer in features, with in particular big changes to the connected home thanks to the Matter protocol!