To be more specific, voice assistants leverage two specific branches of AI: voice recognition and natural language processing (NLP). Like many cutting edge software, voice assistants are powered by narrow artificial intelligence, the kind of AI that is extremely efficient at performing specific tasks, but unable to make general, abstract decisions like the human mind. To better understand the extent of the capabilities of voice assistants, we need to understand the technology that underlies them.

The technology underlying voice assistants The future of voice is the integration of artificial intelligence in plenty of narrow settings and tasks instead of a broad, general purpose AI assistant that can fulfill anything and everything you can think of. To be clear, voice assistants are very useful and their application will continue to expand and become integrated into an increasing number of domains in our daily lives, but not in the omnipresent way that an AI assistant implies. And the years have made the limits of voice more prominent. But Echo was the first device where voice was the only user input mediem. Apple released Siri in 2011 for iOS devices. Voice assistants have existed before the Echo. Testament to the fact: Most people aren’t using Alexa to make purchases, one of the main advertised use cases of Amazon’s AI-powered voice assistant. Nearly four years later, despite the millions of devices sold, it’s clear that like many other visions of the tech industry, that perception was an overstatement. Since Amazon Echo shipped in late 2014, smart speakers and voice assistants have been advertised as the next big thing.

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI.

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