I ask 100 information questions to four digital assistants
What&#x27;s interesting to me reading this is the expectation that voice search should do things that text search currently doesn&#x27;t do. If I ask Google about Bill Murray running for president, I presumably am looking for articles that mention the words &quot;Bill&quot;, &quot;Murray&quot;, and &quot;President&quot;. I would expect to return articles that best match the query, and I would never expect Google to be able to tell me the difference between real and fake articles. For a server to answer the author&#x27;s question it has to understand the question so well it can change the question into &quot;What is the list of people that have run for U.S. president?&quot; and then check if Bill Murray is in that list. That&#x27;s a <i>tall</i> order.<p>We are moving past expecting the most word matches into expecting the server to understand what we really want. Voice search is more like the &quot;I&#x27;m feeling lucky&quot; button, because it takes longer; you only have time for one answer and the first answer has to be right. It comes without the expectation that you&#x27;re <i>lucky</i> if the answer happens to be right, now we <i>need</i> the first result to be the rightest result there is.<p>So the glass is half empty. I personally prefer to see it half-full, but it&#x27;s also true and the critique is more valuable and interesting than optimism.