Microsoft chief calls voice assistants ‘dumb’.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has called voice assistants Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant and Cortana “dumb as traffic jams.” This is reported in a Financial Times article.

In 2016, the head of the company argued that bots were the new apps. Now he has acknowledged that voice assistants have not lived up to expectations.

“They were all as dumb as a traffic jam. Be it Cortana, Alexa, Google Assistant or Siri […]. We had a product that was meant to be the new interface for a large amount of information, but it didn’t work,” Nadella said.

Perhaps the chief’s candour stems from the hype around the deployment of a chatbot with AI in the Bing search service. A month after the announcement, the company managed to revive interest in its not-so-popular service.

One of Siri’s co-creators, Adam Cheyer, also believes that ChatGPT’s ability to understand complex instructions has made existing voice assistants comparatively dumb.

“Previous capabilities were too inconvenient. Nobody knows what they can or cannot do,” he said.

Cheyer added that generative AI has the potential to restore the popularity of assistants:

“Essentially, this technology will provide the breadth, flexibility and complexity that previous generations of voice assistants did not possess. I think there will be a renaissance.”

Earlier, Microsoft was developing its own Siri rival—the Cortana voice assistant. The assistant was used on smartphones running Windows Phone, Android and iOS. In 2015, the service was integrated into Microsoft’s desktop OS.

However, in 2021 the company ceased support for Cortana on mobile platforms. Some features of the assistant remained in the tech giant’s business applications.

In February, Microsoft released Moment 2 update for Windows 11, introducing a number of AI-powered features. Among them is the integration of the Bing chatbot into the taskbar.

In March, an Intel leak hinted at the development of Windows 12 with a focus on AI.