Google Assistant is amazing and I use it constantly. Any task that's could be a single voice request, or a single question/answer, is better with voice than pulling out my phone IMO. Examples:

Playing music, getting directions, and sending texts while driving the car.

Controlling music in my house. Its a lot faster to just ask for something than fiddling with my phone. The kids use it for this too (they also do: "Ok google, tell me a story").

Setting timers in the kitchen while I'm cooking. We have some physical timers but inevitably they're hidden somewhere and/or my hands are dirty when I need them.

Asking random questions: "Ok google, what city has the longest name?", "how many cups is 9 tablespoons?" etc. It can answer a shocking fraction of the questions I throw at it.

I like being able to set an alarm without getting out of bed, and I'm extremely nearsighted, so I like being able to check the time and temperature before I find my glasses. Sometimes, if I can't sleep late at night, it is nice to put on some music or sounds w/o getting up.

It is handy when cooking, you can set named timers, ask for conversions with your hands full.

It is also fun at parties, guests can play whatever songs they want (there is a discount because I have the Amazon music just on that one device).

I listen to the radio on it, and I also get my news from it (I have it programmed to play the NPR news update and then the Fox News update. They usually cover the same stuff, but it is interesting to see how they emphasize different things.)

Alexa seems smarter than Siri or the "hey google" character if you have random questions and don't want to get out your phone or you already have too many tabs open.

I've played around with some of the skills, but really only use the timers, alarms, news, weather, music, streaming radio, and sometimes ask it questions.

Yeah. It just seems like most of those things could be done with ever-so-slightly more effort without this technology.

Most new consumer technologies that end up in every home fundamentally change people's lives. I just don't see that happening here.

We talk about these companies destroying privacy, gaining power on the scale of nation-states, etc. And we put up with them on some things, because smartphones and social media are really useful and can be really important to living modern life. But I just don't get it with the assistants (and really, Amazon shopping too). We're giving up so much as a society for such a tiny modicum of extra convenience.

I really like it, and I'm not convinced I'm giving up that much -- and I don't think there are negative externalities with my use of the device (how am I hurting anyone else?).

At the end of the day its just a fancy clock radio with okay sound that can play anything I want to hear without me getting up. But the "assistant" part of it seems like it is smarter than Siri or hey google.

It's a user interface shift.

A smartphone is an complex always on device with its own internet connection, microphone, GPS and camera.

We are not trading low risk UI with high risk UI. We switch or extend it to nodevice/voice control.

And I personally find it very impressive and subtile.

It just makes sense to use it in your kitchen, bedroom or on the Couch.

It is the same with Philips hue. Do I need it? No. Is it worth to me? Every penny. Why? Because it's a completely new level. Now you can combine lamps which had not one switch like your ceiling lights with a standlamp in the corner and you put your ligjtswitches where you actually are using them.

That was never possible before.and it's great for creating lightsettings. I'm using different lightsettings constantly.

For example our light is much less bright when I go to the toilet at night and it is motion detection based which I really love for our floor.

You're talking about IoT in general; I was specifically talking about voice assistants

I was talking about voice assistant in it's current context.

> meaningfully improved your life

You'll need to define that if you want a proper response. I suspect you don't really want a proper response and are just looking for a way to shit on people who have bought these devices.

Btw like much gadgets these things are for convenience so an example is when cooking and your hands are covered in food instead of setting a timer with your hands you can do it with your voice. Of course you can always just look at a clock and do it in your head manually. Is this a "meaningful" improvement in my life ... That's up for debated. I'd say the same thing though about mobile phones.

Siri is really useful for when I'm in the bath and asking for what time it is.

I don’t think the technology is there yet, but at least the goal is for AI assistants to make lives easier. Maybe not in 2020, but perhaps 2030?

I can understand the Star Trek dream of truly intelligent assistants, but we've been at it for nearly ten years and it hardly feels like the needle has moved. Despite the enormous advances in machine learning as a field over the past few years, AI assistants have mostly just gotten better speech-to-text and text-to-speech, and more developer support. I wouldn't expect a Star Trek "Computer" within the next 50 years at least.

The alternate (much more banal) explanation for the current prevalence is 1) a cynical data-grab on the part of companies, and 2) the devices are cheap and novel for consumers. In other words, it's not that they're creating such great value, but that companies have learned to embed their data-vacuums in what amount to toys.

That prediction really assumes the technology stops progressing at its current rate, which may or may not happen (are we going to hit a wall soon?).

I don’t subscribe to the just a data grab theory, that is incredibly cynical. Also, even a simple device is useful if it’s cheap enough (“Alexa play space unicorn” is really useful for us parents).

Compared to 1966's Eliza we've made good progress: speech to text and text to speech provide a better interface and work good enough (accents are still a big problem though), we can map between many equivalent commands automatically instead of requiring someone to account for all variants manually, and tools like Google's knowledge graph allow answering questions about most simple facts.

Still, that's about all of our progress in 50 years (in production ready, deployed systems). Estimating that we need another fifty years seems fair.

My point is that none of those improvements bring us meaningfully closer to general intelligence. It's all surface-level stuff. Important surface-level stuff, but nevertheless. I don't see much progress in the actual hard part of creating a truly helpful AI assistant.

That progress has mostly come in the last 10 years, not 50. Before that we were just doing it wrong.

That doesn't mean we won't do it wrong for the next 30 years, or that we are doing it right right now.

We have to account for accelerating progress, but I'm not sure that's enough to bring us much closer than 50 years away

Sure, we could hit another wall, deep learning could be a false peak, etc. On the other hand, it could just keep going. Tech companies make bets on this, and if they were conservative they wouldn’t be tech companies.

For me, the really big (and deal-breaking) difference between these "assistants" and Star Trek is that the Star Trek computer doesn't send recordings of you off to the Ferengi homeworld for analysis. We wanted a computer in our homes we can talk to. What we got is a wiretap, and a bunch of guys sitting around stroking their lobes as they gather intelligence on us.