Comment Limited Utility, Basically a Gimmck (Score 1) 135
That said I know exactly one person who uses voice assistants of any kind, but he does so mostly because he's dyslexic and has trouble typing queries in. For persons with mobility issues, fine motor problems, visual disorders, dyslexia, a lack of written language skills, etc. it's super useful. For the rest of us it provides generalized, low grade information without really improving any aspect of the experience. In the case of Alexa blurting out marketing spiel it means getting crappy information plus the digital equivalent of a telemarketing call, anyone at Amazon that is surprised that this isn't considered a compelling experience needs a new job. Of course that the course they're thinking about is to "add more cameras and sensors that would allow devices to recognize different voices or determine which rooms users are in" tells you all you need to know. They see the problem as being that the ads aren't targeted enough to the user/location to provide the proper illusion of utility prior to invoking targeted consumerism and not that the service they're providing really doesn't provide anything truly useful to the user over other means of accomplishing the same thing, and that it also has serious limitations and drawbacks.