Mint Primer: Alexa, why is voice failing to resonate in tech?

livemint.com:

The Humane AI Pin, a voice-controlled personal assistant, was one of Silicon Valley’s most-hyped AI-first products. However, the hype has crashed rather fast. Barring Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, voice interfaces have been tech’s biggest failures.

Mint asks why: The AI Pin, launched by Silicon Valley startup Humane, promised to overhaul consumer technology. To do this, the company’s first gadget showcased an operating system that ran on OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform—which sought to automate most user operations on smartphones. These include playing music, booking cabs, ordering food and more just by voice commands, without needing to open multiple apps.

It is this seamless interoperability that led to the hype around the AI Pin. The Pin also had a camera that could be used to input images, thus promising a future where gadgets become more interactive. In mid-April, Humane started seeding units for evaluation among reviewers and tech testers.

So far, an overwhelmingly large volume of feedback has been highly critical of it, saying most of the voice interactions do not work the way that was promised. Such an issue, however, could largely be because of the fact that most applications work in silos, and multiple permissions are required for them all to work smoothly and in sync. Further, generative AI is yet to become highly accurate, which further adds to complications around using a voice interface as the main way of operating a gadget.

One reason the AI Pin has been questioned is that as a gadget, it doesn’t do anything that a smartphone doesn’t already. Both Android and iOS platforms have voice interfaces for most operations. The only difference that a dedicated AI hardware can do is alter the smartphone form factor, and