Daniel Cooper is Engadget’s roving reporter, tackling the topics both big and small that shape our world. He has been writing about the future for more than 25 years, and abandoned a promising career as an intellectual property lawyer to join Engadget in 2011.
Conversing with your computer has been a dream of futurists and technologists for decades. When you look at 2004’s state of the art, it’s staggering to see how far we’ve come. There are now billions of devices in our hands, and homes that listen to our queries and do their very best to answer them. But for all of the time, money and effort, chatbots of any stripe have not swallowed the world as their creators intended. They’re miraculous. They’re also boring. And it’s worth asking why.
In 2011, the ideas in that early work joined up to make Siri for the iPhone 4S, which was quietly built on Nuance’s work. Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, saw Siri’s promise early and launched a large internal project to make a homegrown competitor. In 2014, Alexa arrived, with Cortana and Google Assistant following in subsequent years. Natural language computing was now available on countless smartphones and smart home devices.
The assumption is that generative AIs bolted onto these natural language interfaces will solve all of the issues presently associated with voice. And yes, on one hand, these systems will be better at pantomiming a realistic conversation and trying to give you what you ask for. But, on the other hand, when you actually look at what comes out the other side, it’s often gibberish. These systems are making gestures toward surface level interactions but can’t do anything more substantive.
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