Satya Nadella , the CEO of Microsoft , mentioned that voice assistants “were as dumb as a rock.”
Satya Nadella , CEO of Microsoft , did not skimp on harshly criticizing voice assistants like Alexa , Siri and even Cortana , which belongs to his company. Despite the fact that the current executive director of the firm was enthusiastic about this technology when it began to become popular, his opinion about it has changed radically in recent years, especially with the new interest that his company has in ChatGPT and artificial intelligence applied in the language models.
According to what the Financial Times newspaper collected, Nadella ‘s last words regarding voice assistants show that the Microsoft boss is not satisfied with the performance of voice assistants today. “They were all dumb as a rock. Whether it’s Cortana or Alexa or Google Assistant or Siri , all of these just don’t work. We had a product that was supposed to be the new front-end to a lot of information that didn’t work. “
Satya Nadella’s change of mind
Voice assistants became quite a sensation with the launch of Siri on the iPhone 4S . Apple ‘s success tried to be emulated by other companies in the sector including Microsoft . This firm wanted to replicate the success of those from Cupertino with Cortana , its own voice assistant. In 2016, Satya Nadella said that these bots were a true revolution, also ensuring that they would become “the new apps”.
However, while the company tried to integrate its voice assistant organically into its tools and apps, it never performed at the same level as Siri . For this reason, almost 7 years after his initial statement, his opinion has changed considerably, especially if we consider that the Cortana mobile app was withdrawn and had less participation due to its poor reception.
The decline of voice assistants and their possible resurgence
In today’s technology industry, there is no more prominent topic than ChatGPT and conversational artificial intelligence , two areas in which Microsoft has shown interest and in which, in fact, it has already invested exorbitant sums of money. One of its applications could lead to the resurgence of voice assistants since, by integrating GPT-3 into a system with these characteristics, the bot can obtain the ability to converse more naturally with the user.
Despite having certain niches, cases like Amazon ‘s with Alexa have been considered failures even if their potential is immense and the firm’s investment was quite strong. Therefore, it seems that the future that awaits voice assistants looks very promising with the popularity of advanced language models, which may re-emerge more flexible and complex than before.