{"id":325115,"date":"2026-02-07T12:14:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-07T12:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/325115\/"},"modified":"2026-02-07T12:14:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-07T12:14:11","slug":"new-voice-assistants-are-officially-a-whiff-for-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/325115\/","title":{"rendered":"New Voice Assistants Are Officially a Whiff (for Now)"},"content":{"rendered":"

After about a decade in the making, new voice assistants<\/a> from Amazon and Google are finally here, and while a lot has changed in the time since they were first released, the new boss, so to speak, feels the same as the old boss\u2014a little hard of hearing.<\/p>\n

This week, Amazon rolled out Alexa+<\/a>, the company\u2019s chatbot-powered sequel for regular, old Alexa. That means everyone with compatible Echo speakers can switch over to Amazon\u2019s new voice assistant, which is now infused with a large language model (LLM) similar to the one used by OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT. It was a long road of early access lasting about a year, which you\u2019d think would help improve the final results, but so far, reactions have been\u2026 underwhelming.<\/p>\n

Comments on Reddit<\/a> are riddled with complaints of slow response times, subpar accuracy<\/a>, and disappointment<\/a> with the general user experience. In other words, the same complaints that plagued voice assistants before the great merging of generative AI. While I haven\u2019t had a chance to test Alexa+ at length myself, tech reviewers like our peers at The Verge<\/a> have given it a whirl, and\u2026 yeah, not so great.<\/p>\n

As deflating as that is, Alexa+ and its anticlimax isn\u2019t the exception\u2014it seems to be the rule. Google also recently rolled out its new AI-infused voice assistant fully, and the results have also lacked fireworks. I\u2019ve been using Gemini for Home<\/a> (Google\u2019s next-gen voice assistant) for a couple of months now and can corroborate the collective lack of enthusiasm.<\/p>\n

\"GoogleGoogle\u2019s next smart speaker has a new pop of color, but that might be all that feels different. \u00a9 Adriano Contreras \/ Gizmodo <\/p>\n

While Gemini for Home may have a more natural-sounding voice and way of speaking, the performance is about the same and sometimes worse than before. One significant bit of friction is that Gemini for Home takes quite a bit longer to process commands than the previous version. That would almost be fine if it were more accurate and better at actually doing what you want, but in my experience, that\u2019s not always the case. Like Alexa+, Gemini for Home gets confused at times, overthinks, or just downright misunderstands what you want\u2014all core problems of previous versions of voice assistants.<\/p>\n

There are\u00a0some\u00a0perks, like being able to tell Gemini for Home to do multiple things in one command, but I\u2019d be lying if I said those perks have materially changed the smart home\/voice assistant experience in the way that Google had forecasted.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m trying to say is that right now, next-gen voice assistants feel like a bit of a whiff. I say \u201cright now\u201d because there\u2019s always room for improvement\u2014maybe a technological breakthrough will usher in a brand new way of marrying voice assistants and LLMs, finally making them feel like a pivotal upgrade. Who knows? If I said I\u2019m optimistic about that prospect, I\u2019d be lying, though. One thing that undercuts my confidence is the only major voice assistant I haven\u2019t mentioned so far: Siri.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s one thing that\u2019s clear about AI Siri<\/a>, it\u2019s that making it do all the stuff Apple wants it to do has been more difficult than the company expected. While a new Siri was announced in 2024, Apple has yet to roll out the full capabilities of its voice assistant, delaying its launch due to concerns over its performance and readiness to function on a mass scale. Apple could finally join the ranks of Alexa+ and Gemini soon\u2014potentially this spring<\/a>\u2014but for now, it stands as a reminder that this whole voice assistant thing is a lot harder than it looks. Even if it does arrive soon, it\u2019s worth noting that Gemini will help power<\/a> the new voice assistant thanks to a deal struck by Google and Apple in January.<\/p>\n

And until someone cracks the code, we\u2019re left with LLM-powered voice assistants that look an awful lot like the non-LLM-powered voice assistants, and something tells me that\u00a0isn\u2019t\u00a0what Google, Amazon, and Apple are going for. Better drink some hot tea with honey, folks, because you may be shouting endlessly at your smart speakers for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After about a decade in the making, new voice assistants from Amazon and Google are finally here, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":325116,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,44316,1463,289,290,18,13167,823,19,17,15165,82,147568],"class_list":["post-325115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-alexa","tag-amazon","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-eire","tag-gemini","tag-google","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-siri","tag-technology","tag-voice-assistants"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116029296687484534","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/325116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}