LLMs and Voice Assistants
Voice Assistants & Dependency…it’s Gonna get Bad!
I’m not particularly concerned about the dystopian futurist predictions of AI taking over the world and destroying humans, certainly not in the near term. But there are some very concerning things ranging from the spreading of bipartisanship (that we’ve seen from news and targeted social media) to the loss of privacy and private data. But I want to bring up something new…The increasing dependency we will have on our voice assistants and the concern that we as consumers will be taken advantage of for this dependency.
David Cahn from Sequoia Capital has eloquently written about the lack of ROI in current AI investments. I generally agree with his sentiments (e.g. a few big winners and many losers). But I have a perspective on the winners, why they will win big, and how consumers’ pocketbooks will get hurt, and I want to raise the question about legality and ethics.
Often the best predictor of the future is the past, and we can look at the Voice Assistants of the past and get a pretty good idea of what’s in store for us, and it’s not pretty. As an active and early user of Alexa/Echo devices and the Google Assistant with their smart speakers here’s the path I have seen:
1) They start with subsidized or low-margin hardware with the best UX they can create
2) Advertising starts creeping in and becoming disruptive to the UX
3) Music playing became crippled (I stopped using Google devices at this point because the experience was so horrible), as they pitched subscription services
4) Now, Alexa randomly engages with me when I don’t call her name. Where did this crazy idea come from???
5) Next will be subscription fees since they haven’t made money from purchasing through Alexa
I rarely use these devices for information access, I mostly use the Echo to play music and now I often link to my phone and play on Spotify so the “smart” is gone from the speaker. So this transition hasn’t been too painful, because I never built a dependence on these voice assistants. They don’t know much about me beyond what music I listen to and they are fairly generic beyond knowing my name, location, and Prime information.
In contrast, I have built a dependence on a guitar-playing app that I bought a few years ago for $1. I have downloaded hundreds of my favorite songs, fixed wrong chords, and changed key signatures. It’s all stored in the app. Recently this app has stopped working for me and I need to upgrade to a subscription. They are offering me the “discounted rate” of $99/yr. I have invested a lot of time and energy into this app that has all my data so I’m very tempted to subscribe, despite their ability to change pricing at any time and for any reason, and the very steep increase in pricing from what I was originally sold.
Now imagine the new generation of voice assistants. They are smarter than ever before, they will be extremely helpful, and they will know all about us and we will become DEPENDENT on them. It’s that dependency that will drive the corporate revenues and hurt our pocketbooks!
Apple’s Siri now has “Apple Intelligence”. It can learn through our emails, texts, posts, what we look at and who we talk to. Google is doing similar things. I expect Siri will evolve from an assistant that everyone complains about to an assistant that everyone loves, and it will become a true personal assistant, really helping us in our daily lives. And once that dependence exists, then what is to stop Apple from following the same path that Amazon, Google and my guitar app tried to do…sell us a product, increase advertising, grow a dependency then charge more for usage!
As a final thought, I want to talk about the ethics and legalities of selling a product, learning about us, and then charging more for what we already thought we bought. I get it that companies are making investments, and they need revenues and profits to keep investing and growing. However, I find it deceptive that we buy a product, and we think the software is included then we later find out we need to pay more for the full value that we thought we already bought…especially since the value change is from our personal data!
Electronics have emerged from a world where the software came with the product and was “dumb” and didn’t change (like in our TVs and microwaves of yesteryear), to a world of smart devices collecting data, communicating with a cloud, downloading new features (or bugs, advertisements, solicitations, interruptions, etc.). Now the product we bought can ask us for money for what we thought we already paid for…and we will become dependent on subscribing…Is that fair or legal? What if you bought a microwave and the buttons stopped working unless you paid a subscription fee?
