Still feels like 20% of the time I try to use Siri/Alexa, they hit one of these failure modes:<p>1. Fail to activate<p>2. Fail to respond (just keep listening forever)<p>3. Activate on the wrong device (talking to Siri on Phone, HomePod 2 rooms over responds)<p>4. Fail to access data they should have ("Who is speaking?" or "I'm having trouble...")<p>Thinking over it, I think voice assistants have the most bugs of any technology I use daily.
It's because they're a cost center. They don't generate revenue for any big tech company. No one makes purchase decisions based on the voice assistant quality.<p>I know a few people who lightly use them for timers or music, but almost no one goes deeper than that.
I built an Alexa skill at work. It's mostly a ton of edge cases and prompt variations you have to handle. Alexa also has a very short time out, something like 8 seconds, so your skill will time out very easily. Handling state is a whole other fiasco.<p>Some things are out my control, like if Alexa picks up the skill invocation phrase or parses the response correctly.<p>I suspect LLMs will help with this. Alexa is already integrating LLMs with their newer skill kits.