Analysts reported that Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, as well as other artificial intelligence devices are not smart enough to have a coherent conversation with humans.
Above other things, analysts said that the latest Echo Show product is just an attempt to address all the things artificial intelligence can’t do.
This Tuesday, Amazon released the Echo Show: a voice-controlled speaker that also has a touchscreen display. The gadget will be available starting with June, for somewhere around $229.99. Moreover, it represents the company’s next generation of the Echo speaker product.
However, critics did not wait and came with some offensive words about Alexa.
“The problem is simply that Alexa (and all other others) are far too stupid to be able to hold a meaningful conversation with a user. Google Assistant is currently the best but remains woefully short of what one would consider to be a useful assistant,” Richard Windsor, analyst at Edison Investment Research
Moreover, he added that digital assistants were designed to “replace the human variety”. However, due to the fact that their intelligence is as limited as it is, they are unable to keep a conversation going with the user.
Currently, the Google voice assistant competes with Alexa, Siri (Apple) and Cortana (Microsoft),
When contacted, Amazon did not respond in any way to any of the comments.
On the other hand, recent reports suggested that Amazon is going to dominate the market, as the company has a 70.6% market share and is expected to reach 35.6 million of voice-controlled speakers users.
In addition to this, RBC suggested in March that Alexa could be bringing in $10 billion in revenues by 2020. The sales are said to come from devices containing the voice assistant, shopping, and cloud solutions.
There are also analysts who suggest that Alexa is far better than anything present on the market at the moment:
“I’d argue that Amazon is actually, from a technology footprint, years ahead of rivals. If you focus too much on Amazon Echo then you completely miss the bigger picture which is the operating system opportunity of Alexa that goes way beyond Echo,” Neil Campling, technology and media analyst
