There is one killer application for voice assistants: answering phone calls. I wish Siri could respond to all unknown phone numbers, screen promotional and robocalls, take notes if necessary and report what's important to me (and I need to be able to tell her what's NOT important). This is what the assistants should do, not switching lights or trying to play a random song.
Neither Siri nor its competition can do this. Speech recognition accuracy is not really important, it can just take voice notes as a fallback, or ask to "press 1" to talk to me directly.
I remember Google showing this kind of tech off a year or two at their dev conference. Was it just vaporware with a person in the back using a synthesized voice? We’re waiting google
Google's demonstration was kinda "Hey! We've got this great feature where our personal assistant will piss off everyone you interact with in order to save you 10 seconds making a dinner reservation". I'm not surprised it went no where.
Neither Siri nor its competition can do this. Speech recognition accuracy is not really important, it can just take voice notes as a fallback, or ask to "press 1" to talk to me directly.