Google and Amazon are promising a lot with new voice assistants, but whether they can deliver is a much bigger question.
If you believe what Google and Amazon want you to believe, this is the age of voice assistants… once again. This week, both companies unveiled more details about the future of their smart home ecosystems, which centers on a couple things: new smart speakers (of course) in the form of the Google Home Speaker and new Echo products with better sound and faster chips, but perhaps more importantly, a new, and supposedly, upgraded crop of voice assistants to power them. For Google, it’s Gemini for Home and, for Amazon, there’s Alexa+, both of which are being fueled by advances in large language models (LLMs) like those used by ChatGPT.
In both companies’ estimation, Alexa+ and Gemini for Home are not just new generations of voice assistants, but the first real generational expansion since the dawn of voice assistants 10 years ago. With that anticipation are some big promises. This time around, the companies say, you’ll be able to do it all. Want an Uber? Order it with Alexa+. Want to check your home camera to see what your cats have been up to all day? Ask Gemini. Want to turn off every smart light in your house except one? Well, that’s something you can actually ask for now instead of painstakingly lobbing several commands and hoping they stick. It all sounds great. It sounds like exactly the type of ambient computing we’ve yearned for since voice assistants crept their way into our homes ages ago. It all sounds so ideal, and it also sounds, if I’m being honest, like it could be a total crock of shit.
Let me be clear: I have no doubt that chatbots can be transformative in some ways. We’ve already seen how they can be applied to areas like search, allowing for more complex queries, comparisons, and advice. We’ve seen their generative capabilities when combined and transposed to models like Veo or Sora. We’ve seen how they can code basic apps by just typing an idea into a text box. Even if all those capabilities are far from perfect, we’ve seen hard examples of how they can work when they work well.
