Is the AI going in the right direction?

After the Google I/O and the WWDC comes out that, the next big thing is AI… It is incredible how this technology is becoming real and usable, what is not clear is why the input have to be our voice?
Do you think as me that will be wired and not even comfortable to speak with your computer or your smartphone? In the sci-fi movie, it is for sure cool but in real life…
How you deal with 20 people in the office speaking with the computer or ordering task to your phone in the subway…
My question is why this AI assistant need to be trigged by our voice, and can’t be silent.
Using Siri to know the sport results is what Google Now solved with the cards.
I can see this technology useful just when you cannot type or touch the phone, am I missing something, do we really need a digital personal assistant?

Traditionally, the reasons you state have been a reason it hasn’t been adopted (voice recognition is 30+ years old). Some of these problems have supposedly been solved if the reviews of the Amazon Echo are to be believed.

AI has been held up by lack of cultural understanding. I remember an interview with a French author who moved to Canada. He arrived in Toronto and had problems, he thought because of the language. After moving to Montreal he found he had just as much trouble because he understood the words, but not the larger culture. He ended up returning to Toronto.

Same with AI, historically. It can recognize the words, but not the cultural references which is a huge percentage of our speech content. There has been enormous progress here too, as you can find on TED talks.

The last issue is adoption. Siri, Cortana, whatever the Google version is, all work incredibly well. However, I saw that only about 40% of iPhone owners regularly use Siri. On top of that, they normally use it at home for specific tasks. I believe it’s because the utility of communicating verbally to a computer or network is just inherently low.

I’ve seen a similar problem with smart home stuff. Getting up on flipping a switch is easier than getting the phone out of the pocket, waking up the phone, entering your password, navigating to the app and hitting a switch. Maybe 1 out 10 times you can save effort through programming, but the short interactions are just so much easier without the smart home app that it doesn’t make sense for most users.

We shall see though:)

I agree with Mr-914
I’ve read that the most intelligent computers in the world are perhaps as smart as a cat, in capacity to learn about the world and respond to changes. Whats available to consumers is really just a collection of millions of “if-then” statements with some fancy statistics (not to diminish that achievement). Smart Homes just aren’t smart enough to be all that useful (see Nest’s problems)
based on my corner of trying to launch consumer electronics, I think there’s also a trust of technology issue in addition to the lack of real utility preventing adoption.

It is exactly my point, no one want to speak with their phone because the point is that we have phone that are smart as cats, and it is incredible, but cats are not smart at all, compared to the tasks you are to lazy to do by yourself.
We are trying to make a secretary, digital. And my question is do we need a secretary (someone to instruct with our thought) or we just need to make things done, to have the desktop clean and the grocery list already done for the days I have to watch Games of Thrones.

I find that I only talk to my phone in private. I don’t know how strong the social pressure is to not verbally interact with electronics in public, but it could be a pretty strong factor against it too.

AI is going far beyond phone applications. I’m super curious to see where it’s gonna be 5 years from now, 10 years from now etc. I mean, it’s already happening and many brilliant minds are working on it from every corner. If we don’t destroy ourselves in the near future we’ll see some REALLY cool things entering our lives.

I remember reading something by Don Norman about the concept of recycle bin on computers.

clicks delete
“Are you sure you want to delete?”
*clicks yes"
clicks empty recycle bin
“Are you sure you want to emptry recycle bin, this can not be undone?”
ARGH!!! clicks yes
Oh no…where is my file?

I can just imagine the verbal equivalent.