Satya NadellaCEO of Microsoftdid not skimp on harsh criticism of voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri and up to Cortanawhich belongs to his company. Although the firm’s current CEO was enthusiastic about this technology when it first became popular, his opinion about it has changed radically in recent years, especially with his company’s new interest in ChatGPT and artificial intelligence applied in language models.
As reported in the newspaper Financial Timesthe last words of Nadella with respect to voice assistants demonstrate that the head of Microsoft Is not satisfied with the performance of voice assistants today. “They were all dumb as a rock. Whether it was Cortana o Alexa o Google Assistant o Siriall 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 mindset.
Voice assistants became a sensation with the launch of Siri at iPhone 4S. The success of Apple tried to be emulated by other companies in the industry including. Microsoft. This firm wanted to replicate the success of those of Cupertino with Cortanaits own voice assistant. In 2016, Satya Nadella said that these bots were a real revolution, also assuring 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. Therefore, almost 7 years after his initial statement, his opinion has changed considerably especially if we consider that the app from Cortana on cell phones was withdrawn and had less participation due to its poor reception.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 salient issue that ChatGPT and the conversational artificial intelligencetwo sections in which Microsoft has shown interest and in which, in fact, it has already invested exorbitant sums of money. One of its applications could bring about the resurgence of voice assistants since, by integrating GPT-3 to such a system, the bot can gain the ability to converse more naturally with the user.
Despite having certain niches, cases such as. Amazon 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 of voice assistants looks very promising with the popularity of advanced language models, which may re-emerge as more flexible and complex than before.
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