The lost decade

ChatGPT has left digital voice assistants like Siri and Alexa looking dumb and oh so 10 years ago.

- Peter Griffin

If you've had a play with ChatGPT, you probably have a very obvious question: why don't digital assistants Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant have such advanced conversational skills as the chatbot that has taken the internet by storm?

After all, Amazon has had the Alexa Echo voice assistant devices on the market since 2014. Siri, Apple's voice assistant built into its Mac computers, iPhones, smartwatches and home speakers, has been around since 2011.

Google Home devices appeared later, in 2016, but Google and Amazon spent vast sums of money subsidising the price of the hardware so they could get the devices into as many homes as possible. You can buy an Amazon Echo Dot device for about $50.

The Big Tech companies that released artificial intelligence-powered, voice-activated assistants received a trove of data yielding insights into what we want to know. Unfortunately for Apple, Amazon and Google, what we wanted to know turned out to be obvious stuff, such as the weather forecast for Auckland, or screening times at the local movie theatre. Amazon, to its dismay, discovered that people didn't use Echo to search for and buy things in its massive online store.