Another AI assistant... It's getting crowded in here, isn't it, Siri?

Re: I'm still lost.

Yep, I remember the first time I encountered someone using a hands-free/bluetooth/microphone setup some years ago on a (rare) visit to London. I was quite used to people wandering around stations muttering to themselves, but they usually carried a bottle of cheap sherry in a brown paper bag. One in a suit was something new.

And haven't we had enough of "I SAID, I'M ON THE TRAIN"? Won't it be confusing when 17 different Alexae (is that the correct plural) all simultaneously hear "What time is the next train from Waterloo to a/b/c/d"? Bloody irritating for the other passengers too.

Re: I'm still lost.

I have an amazon echo dot. Yes, it listens all the time, but it's sat in my media room and it works brilliantly, and I use it every day, from dimming the lights by voice, looking up snippets of quick info "Alexa, what's the freezing point of mercury" was the last one, through to "play me some chillout music." some of the features - like the BBC flash briefing - are great, and I wouldn't have even considered them before owning it.

I use it far more than my smartphone voice assistants as it's at home and doesn't suffer the same social awkwardness that speaking to your mobile in public does. For me, it's no more awkward than a star-trek style "computer; lights" would be.

Though i'm still waiting for one of my friends to come over and do a https://xkcd.com/1807/

Re: They are all shit

>Until then, they are toys for the curious.

Voice input is just generally bad. Even if it worked perfectly, it is *slow* ... and it doesn't work perfectly. Would you rather navigate your bank's voice prompts or sit in front of computer and click/type through the login sequence?

Voice recognition is best when you've already decided on voice interaction (calling the bank) but the bank is desperate not to pay for someone to talk to you. It could also work for car-based SMS systems. As a general interface, however, its pretty poor.

These assistants – which use powerful AI (artificial intelligence) engines to deliver detailed, context-aware and personalized answers to users’ questions

Yep, stuff like the above is total marketing bullshit. Hello, El Reg [SLAP], are you listening?

They have reasonable voice recognition routines that may, just may, use some neural nets but most likely just refined algorithms. Neural nets are rather expensive to simulate in either software or hardware compared to traditional voice processing. These words then get passed through a few filters to try and figure out what the poor user actually wanted, then these words are passed onto a specific application that may, possibly, could do (but almost certainly doesn't) use AI or neural net processing in order to process the provided words and perform an action or give a response.

In other words, pretty nifty language processing being passed onto textual services depending on the interpreted words. What these services do may or may not be clever, but it ain't AI by any stretch of the imagination. It's most likely not even Machine Learning.