We have many voice assistants in our lives.
I have Google Assistant on my phone. It is great.
The Gotham Gal has Siri on her phone. It is OK.
We have Amazon Alexa and Google Home in our apartment.
We have Siri on our AppleTV/Siri Remote.
We can talk to our car.
But the honest truth is we rarely use any of them.
The one we use most is the Siri Remote when using AppleTV because it is by far the best way to control that device.
It is not an issue of the quality of the voice recognition on these services. It is great.
It is a question of the relatively weak utility of the experience relative to alternatives combined with not building the muscle memory to use voice assistants more.
I was walking home from the gym this morning and was wondering if we are typical.
So I just ran this Twitter poll:
Do you regularly use a voice assistant in your life?:
— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) April 8, 2018
Twitter polls only allow for four options so this is far from scientific and also suffers from the bias inherent in my Twitter followership.
But almost 500 replies in, over 60% replied no.
About 20% say they use a voice assistant regularly in their home.
And about 10% say they use a voice assistant on their phone.
I’m happy to learn that we are not in the luddite category when it comes to voice assistants.
More like the mainstream.
But certainly not in the early adopter cohort which is not small.
It does make me wonder how many of those Alexas and Google Homes are sitting around collecting dust.
