And I can see a very obvious reason why: it's easier. Typing is annoying and slow, and you make lots of mistakes. People don't care others are listening. When was the last time you memorized something irrelevant someone else next to you was saying on the phone?
Maybe you don't want a single word of what you talk about to be heard by anyone else. But most other people don't care, and the reality is that most other people around are too bothered with their own lives to pay any attention to it.
http://h4labs.org/the-amazon-echo-made-a-dent-in-the-univers...
As you say, a big win by text is that you can quickly skim it, ignore parts of it that you don't deem to be relevant, and essentially only use the working/short-term memory for the information you are interested the most in the context. Therefore, if the device responds back to you in voice, even if it's entirely a human-like experience, that's still inferior (at least in terms of speed) compared to the text-based experience.
Even for using voice as an input-only mechanism, it's still going to contain lots of redundant/useless information and verbosity.
Compare "OK google, what is the price of bitcoin today?" vs goolging "bitcoin price".
Like:
- "Number for city of [myCity] utilities"
- "[what's the current] bitcoin price"
- "what's my checking account balance"
- "remind me on the first to change the air filter every [X] months"
Etc. Essentially this would be used while I don't want to bother people around me. I'll be eager to use a voice assistant when it becomes convenient for me. Siri isn't there yet, but my Alexa interactions are damn-near close already (No experience with Google or others). If this saves me from opening up a google tab, or some little-used app then I'm all for it.
What Alexa considers Utterances can simply be interpreted as text instead of speech[-to-text]. The testing tools for Alexa Skills already allows this. Hell, I developed a skill with a strong user base without an Echo device at all.
I use Alexa/Amazon in this case because I've used it first-hand. Any other AI would work just as well (as talking directly to it).
It feels like the reason why some of these voice systems actually have utility is because they are usable in scenarios where you typically can't/don't want to type (such as while driving, lying on the couch at your house, etc). When you require somebody to type in their query, I'm struggling to see why an Alexa/AI chat thread would perform better than just a search engine with AI features. Or how, practically, it's different than just a "thread" where what you type goes to a search engine.
There would be a lot of noise pollution everywhere, with people constantly murmuring to themselves, alternated with an unresponsive silence while listening to the device‘s answer. It would seem like everybody is on the phone, all the time. Also, for me, digesting information via text is way easier, because I can jump back and forth to support short term memory - good luck with that with a voice assistant.
The iPhone (and friends) disrupted the PC because they made reading and writing mobile. Voice assistants are not iterating on this paradigm, but they are rather iterating on phone calls. I‘m skeptical that this is suitable to replace the iPhone I‘m writing this on.