Alexa, wash the dishes! Alexa, change my kid’s diaper! Alexa, pickup my kid from school! Alexa, vacuum the living room! Alexa, take out the trash!
She can’t help me with any of that.
I guess everyday people need to have lower barriers to interacting with computers, but I’m good. I like to read HN the way I would have read the newspaper. I listen to some podcasts the way I would have listened to the radio. Beyond that I don’t have much non-professional use for computers.
Oh she will, eventually.
Already she can basically do all your shopping. That's a servant job alright. And there are plenty of other things that you would typically ask of "the help", which I bet you can already do:
"send an Amazon gift voucher to my cousin on 25 december."
"call a Uber for 5pm and send it to address X to pick up the kids."
"find plumbers near me with good ratings."
"call my lawyer on Skype."
And there will be things that will likely appear very quickly:
"create a new document with template X and the following text: ..."
"make a mix of songs A, B and C and send it to my girlfriend."
"share photos of holiday X with Dad"
... and so on and so forth. As more and more things are plugged in, it will really feel like you had an invisible servant at your disposal, doing all the dirty work for you, starting with "dealing with computer interfaces" which is what it does right now. Some things are obviously difficult or pointless to automate (like sorting dirty clothes or loading a dishwasher - note how the actual washing is already automated). Some are easier, like sweeping floors with a Roomba.
It's like we were looking at the Apple II, and you were complaining that the desktop cannot write a letter and send it for you. Vocal recognition is an enabler, an interface. If the interface is successful (and it looks like this is the case), programs and "peripherals" will come.
By that I mean, they will run a rather random route, and may or may not get to that spot on the rug you'd rather them clean, which would harken the "Alexa, clean the rug".
These things, although still very cool, seem kinda useless for anything other than once-a-day scheduled routines for keeping dirt, hair, and other messes down to a minimum.
Ironically each commercial will show the robot cleaning up a spilled mess with easy, none can actually "see" these messes. But you know, marketing.
This could probably be solved by the robot mapping floors as it sweeps them, which most already do. Results could be accessed via pc/tablet, where a user could mark specific areas as "rug", "kitchen" etc. I bet we will see this sort of feature appear in a not-so-distant future.
Duh, because this has been the holy grail of personal computers since forever: you ask and computers do, no questions asked, no training, nothing. It's having servants without the pesky societal thing. In any scifi story ever there is something like that.
It's the first time it really feels like AI dreams are getting real. Interpreting speech is something so human that a computer doing it feels magical; and it removes all barriers to interacting with computers, which is a real problem that most people still have. Of course regular humans (i.e. not geeks) love this technological leap.
The technology is here to stay, one way or another, that's obvious. But problem-solving types of people (i.e. geeks) are bound to see the issues, the kinks, that can ruin the dream.
For me, the privacy implications are still a big obstacle; the world is still full of totalitarian states, even supposedly "democratic" states can barely survive periodic bouts of everyday fascism. This sort of tech is a totalitarian wet dream. We need better protections, in law as well as in tech, or we'll end up under constant STASI-like surveillance in our kitchens.