Named & Shamed
Junk offender: ‘Smart’ assistants
Junk offender: ‘Smart’ assistants
It’s hard to get away from so-called ‘smart’ assistants these days. These voiceactivated tools are on your PC, your smartphone, your home speaker system and, sometimes, even your TV. I can see the potential for voice commands – it’s a more natural way of interacting with devices and can offer benefits to people with disabilities. The trouble is that the technology just isn’t there yet. At best, it’s gimmicky. At worst, it’s exasperating, intrusive and mostly pointless.
Siri, Apple’s smart assistant, is built into my Homepod speaker. The problem is it’s not very smart. In fact, it’s unable to do much more than retrieve a few news headlines and repeatedly misinterpret what I say. A good example is the fact that Siri just can’t seem to get its head around the concept of Nat King Cole, inexplicably playing a Christmas album by the US band Low, every time the old crooner (one of my mum’s favourites) is requested.
Meanwhile, Cortana (for me, at least) is borderline bloatware. It comes built into every single Windows 10 PC, but how many people actually use it? I know I don’t. In the early days, I experimented with Cortana a bit, but found it mostly hopeless. It didn’t help that Cortana refused to believe I lived in east London, preferring to provide me with completely irrelevant cinema listings and weather reports for somewhere in Bedfordshire instead (see screenshot).
But what really annoys me about smart assistants is that, while you can (to a lesser or greater degree) ignore them, they’re still there in the background, consuming system resources, taking up valuable space, and – in some cases – even gathering data.
Microsoft recently announced that it is separating Cortana from the standard Windows 10 search ( www.snipca. com/30371). For me, this is a step in the right direction, but I believe users should be able to choose to uninstall smart assistants altogether, should they wish. I know I would.