I ask 100 information questions to four digital assistants
What's interesting to me reading this is the expectation that voice search should do things that text search currently doesn't do. If I ask Google about Bill Murray running for president, I presumably am looking for articles that mention the words "Bill", "Murray", and "President". 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's question it has to understand the question so well it can change the question into "What is the list of people that have run for U.S. president?" and then check if Bill Murray is in that list. That'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 "I'm feeling lucky" 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'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's also true and the critique is more valuable and interesting than optimism.