Where is the age of the voice assistant?
Sep 19th, 2025 - scudoLately, all the big AI corporations tend to try to sell their product as something that will make your life easier by automating boring tasks. But this is not new stuff, is it?
Back in the early 2010s, voice assistants like Siri were all the rage. They promised much of the same things that AI companies try to sell now: talk to your phone to do stuff.
Now, of course they could do less; they were simpler, but they were more efficient because they were very specialized. BlackBerry phones had in-built local voice assistants with dedicated hardware buttons in 2007, and they ran pretty well. They couldn't do very much, but what they could do was most of the stuff you'd want to do on a phone anyways, like make phone calls while driving. Heck, the Motorola RAZR V3 has a similar feature! And that phone came out in 2003 and had an absolutely garbage SoC.
My first experience with this stuff was on Samsung's voice assistant - I forgot how was it called - on one of their flagship phones circa 2014. They had a proprietary system back then, not just a "OK Google" wrapper (remember "OK Google"? it still shipped on Android devices at least as late as 2022, and I think phones newer than that still have it. Now I'm afraid it's just shoving everything into Gemini).
Back then, for a while voice assistants were seen as the future of mobile phones; being able to just tell the phone what you wanted to do and it did that for you. It seemed, for a while, like the most amazing tech ever. For like a year.
Back then people were changing what they did with their phones; they were becoming the ever-present device that everyone hates and everyone has do deal with to coexist in modern society. Chat apps like WhatsApp - which was a revolution in itself, since it made everyone converge into a single chat app - or... well, everyone uses that, and banking apps, and video games, all this stuff was taking off at the time, both on Android and iOS (and Symbian, and Windows Phone, but nobody cared about those), so voice assistants made in 2012 with the mindset of "well people will just keep using our proprietary chat app and will occasionally want to look up things on Google" were left in the dust very fast, because they had no way to integrate with the apps.
Nowadays, voice assistants still ship on phones - they've evolved a lot as well, now they can do so much more than they could in the past; and especially thanks to LLMs, they are being pushed to users again. Only this time, they're much worse, much more useless and are forced way harder into the face of users.
People used to dislike tech like Siri or Alexa because everybody knew that they were (and are) listening to everything all the time - now it seems that they just don't care, like convenience is more important than not letting a multi billion dollar corporation know everything about you all the time in order to sell ads.
We used to live in different times, I guess. We were promised real-time voice interaction with phones in 2012 to automate boring tasks, and we are still being promised the same thing 13 years later.
So, I'm asking: where is this fabled future where everyone talks to their computer and they do the thing? Where is this utopia we've been talking about since at least the 1960s?
My answer is: it's all just a marketing lie. Talking to a computer feels stupid, like, you're talking to a machine and expect it to react humanly? This is absurd to think about.
If we ever want to live in this world of "human computers"- and I hope it will be more keen to Star Trek than to Google's ads about Gemini in Pixel phones - we have to figure out a way to make a computer not feel like a computer and more as an independent living entity. And that is just straight up science fiction.
