Perhaps you were slightly unnerved by Silicon Valley cheering Google's startlingly convincing and conversant simulation of a human voice! You know they don't really give a damn about online fakery and abuse, so you know they won't give a damn what ends this tech is put to.
Thankfully, it probably won't work quite so well as the demo. Mr. Bandwagon's edit of Google's presentation is great, an artifact popping in perfect form from the near future's mercifullly unequal distribution.
The thing is this: if humans don't know they're talking to robots, they won't talk in a way robots will understand, which is what we tend to do with Siri and other voice assistants. It'll take a lot of machine learning to grasp the complexities and vagaries of truly natural human speech, a point so obvious that everyone assumes it will obviously be overcome.
Maybe we'll find ourselves talking robotically for the benefit of machines we believe are human. But it's more likely we'll become swiftly inoculated against The Voice, attuned to its little shibboleths and flaws--no Voight-Kampff test necessary--at least for now. We'll just be angrier than ever at our phones, hanging up at the first sign of Robocall 2.0, until it becomes so pervasive we have no choice.
Research into the shittiness of voice assistants zeroed in on a problem that many people were all-too-aware of: the inability of these devices to recognize "accented" speech ("accented" in quotes because there is no one formally correct English, and the most widely spoken English variants, such as Indian English, fall into this "accented" category).
New research from legendary usability researchers The Nielsen (previously) Norman (previously) Group finds that voice assistants are basically a hot mess that people only use because they are marginally better than nothing.
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