But, for all their improvements, one thing holds them back: They don’t understand you.
They rely too much on specific voice commands.
Speech Recognition is Just a Magic Trick
Voice assistants don’t understand you.
Not really, anyway.
If it finds an exact match, then it follows a set of instructions.
It’s little more than sleight of hand magic to trick you into thinking it understands.
It isn’t hard to trip up voice assistants either.
While you’re free to ask Alexa “Do you work for the NSA?”
and get an answer, if you ask “Are you secretly part of the NSA?”
Humans, who genuinely understand speech, don’t work like this.
Suppose you ask a human, “What is that klarvain in the sky?
A human wouldn’t say “I don’t know that one” to a question like that.
That humans can lie is something that comes with real understanding.
That fact shows when third-party devices come in to play.
An exact example would be: “Tell Whirlpool to pause the dryer.”
Amazon
For an even harder to remember example, theGeneva Alexa skillcontrols some GE ovens.
A human could follow these requests though.
Amazon and Google have worked very hard to overcome these obstacles, and it shows.
you should probably use the correct syntax, in the correct order.
And if you think that sounds a lot like acommand line, you’re not wrong.
Voice assistants are no different.
you better know the correct way to say a command or ask a question.
Even when you do use the correct syntax in the right order, the process may fail.
Either with the wrong response issued or a surprising result.
In the above example, the command “Set a timer for a half hour” is given.
And yet repeating the same command three other times worked correctly and created a 30-minute timer.
Using the command “Set a timer for 30 minutes” works correctly on a more consistent basis.
You may not need to learn a new language, but you oughta learn a new dialect.
With a correctly set up smart home and well-trained user, most smart home commands will work as intended.
But this came through work and effort, not intellectual understanding.
Timers and Alarms used to be simplistic.
Over timenaming was added, then the ability to add time to a timer.
They moved from simplistic to more complicated.
Voice assistants can answer more questions, and each day brings new skills and features.
But that isn’t a product of self-growth that comes from learning and understanding.
And none of that delivers the inherent capability to use what is known to reach the unknown.
For every command and question that does work, there will always be three that don’t.
Without a breakthrough in A.I.
that grants a human-like ability to understanding, Voice assistants aren’t assistants at all.
In other words:machines are learning things, but can’t understand them.
Related:The Problem With AI: Machines Are Learning Things, But Cant Understand Them
