Voice assistants are a very visible technological category. People ranging from general consumers to enterprise executives

and government bureaucrats are discussing the ramifications of the service in various areas of our society.

Voice assistants can be accessed via mature form factors such as smartphones and tablets as well as new form factors such as dedicated speakers and appliances. Robotics and AI are part of the conversation but really it is about how we access information and the relationship between the end user and the provider. 

This is where the perception problem comes into focus. There are plenty of ads showcasing voice assistants at their best and in their most effective use case. However, when speaking to members of the general public the reviews are not always compatible with the vision presented by the commercial. Voice assistants do not always talk back with witty banter. Sometimes, the response is a web page or picture. Discussion at the water cooler exchange experiences that refer to the assistants as not being that smart. This is due to the expectations. In the commercials and in optimal use cases, assistants are presented and perceived as Artificial intelligence instead of interfaces to semantic databases of responses archived based on previous use behavior by the public and machine learning. 

Luddites are also many. Voice assistants are viewed by members of the public as spies, big brother, and 1984. Perhaps it is pop culture and film or conspiracies, but many people believe phones/voice assistants already listen to us without first gaining permission or without being invoked with key commands. Clearly, if permission has been granted, listening is expected to better assist and perform reasonable tasks. However, terms of service for software and services can be up to 40 pages for some products, so this does not inspire confidence that the devices are not data mining directly and indirectly in order to find out information that would be valuable to advertisers and to the OEM manufacturers of the hardware. 

Sale reports have been positive, but until the focus areas of privacy and efficiency are resolved, voice assistants will have challenges reaching mass adoption. Over time, with R&D, they most certainly will improve. When it comes to privacy, it is harder to guess. People are questioning their relationship with cloud storage providers, social media, and their mobile devices so they may not be so quick to disregard concerns and give up the privacy fight. Stay tuned.