DOES YOUR SMART ASSISTANT REALLY KNOW IT ALL?
There’s now so much data on the internet that it would take 181 million years to download – and yes, I did Google that. Meanwhile, the three billion of us who own a smartphone can use our voices to quiz Siri and
Google Assistant. At home, we don’t even have to leave the comfort of the sofa to ask Alexa et al. But where are these devices getting their data from and can it be trusted?
Research by Forrester shows that people prefer phone assistants to smart speakers, but both are only as smart as the sources they use to get the information.
“Amazon Alexa and Google Home use complicated machine learning techniques to understand what you’re saying, but once they do, they can revert to some of the dumb old techniques,” said Carroll Wainwright, a research scientist at the Partnership on AI. “If you ask, ‘Alexa, what’s the weather look like today?’ it could just give you the same result that you’d get from Google.”
Similarly, smartphone voice assistants use search engines. In 2017, Apple switched the default search engine to Google from Microsoft’s Bing for its Siri digital assistant.
In 2019, Forrester put smart voice assistants to the test with 180 commercial questions, and concluded that only 35% of their questions yielded satisfactory answers. It’s worth noting that, as with search engines, you only get out of smart devices what you put in. Another Forrester study found, in the case of smart speakers, that people are only using them for limited functions: for 65% of those asked, the most common request was a weather forecast.