I was having a poo earlier, as you do, and since our toilet is like sitting inside an actual blast furnace during the summer months, I had the window open as wide as it could go to let some air in. A side-effect of this is that I can hear what is going on outside (and quite possibly that anyone outside can hear what is going on inside the toilet, but I've never tested that theory) and, more often than not, I hear my neighbours going about various business in their garden.
Our neighbours have a couple of kids, and the kids are often out the back using their trampoline. This evening it sounded like there was some sort of family meal or gathering outside, and there was music playing, evidently via some sort of Alexa-based smart speaker, because every couple of minutes — and inevitably well before a song had played to its conclusion, because who has time to listen to music in its entirety any more? — I heard one of my neighbours going "Alexa, next one". And, on multiple occasions, repeating this command at least once before Alexa actually played the "next one".
After several failed attempts to get Alexa to stop playing the Electric Light Orchestra, I heard some frustrated-sounding swearing coming from the garden, then the music stopped suddenly. A few moments later, it started again, but with no voice commands required. I imagine my neighbour had given up on trying to control the music with his voice and just gone back to good "old-fashioned" streaming from his phone.
I honestly have never seen the point of voice assistants. It is several orders of magnitude less convenient to do things with your voice than it is to just click on something on a computer or tap on it on a phone — with one of the chief reasons being, as demonstrated by my neighbour's frustrations, the fact that on a statistically significant number of occasions, you probably have to correct the device's misunderstanding of what you said, by which point you may as well have just fished your phone out of your pocket and typed what you were looking for into Google (not that Google is a great help these days with those fucking AI summaries) or opened your music app and pressed "Next".
I don't know. It's been said many times before, but it feels like a lot of today's tech is being built to solve problems that never existed in the first place. If I run out of milk, the last thing on my mind is telling a robot that fact; I either go out and get some milk myself, or I do what a normal person does and write it on a bit of paper on the fridge, forget about it until 10.48pm, then have to brave the mean streets of Southampton to walk to Tesco Express just so I can have a coffee the following morning. If I tell Alexa, or Google, or whatever, that I'm out of milk, sure, that fact is recorded somewhere, but it doesn't achieve anything. I could probably make it so that it ordered some milk from Amazon or something, but what an absolute faff. Shopping with a voice assistant is an absolutely alien concept to me, because it completely eliminates the ability to look at what's available, the prices and suchlike. So why would you bother?
Answer is, we don't. We have a couple of smart speakers, but all they get used for is finding our phones if we've forgotten where we put them down, and occasionally streaming some music, which we do via the "cast" button in our music apps rather than attempting to talk to them. I think our Alexa thing also controls our smart light switches, but again, no voice controls are involved there, and it could probably be done via another means.
When I did a very brief stint working for a courier company, it was vaguely useful to say "okay Google, take me to [postcode]" and it be able to navigate me there, but I'm not sure it was actually any quicker or better to do that than just typing said postcode into Google Maps. And if I'd typed it in, at least I knew it was right.
As tech critic Ed Zitron frequently notes, tech used to be fun and exciting, but these days it just seems to be finding new and exciting ways to make things less convenient and more annoying. And, of course, this isn't even getting into the "AI" garbage.
I hope that one day very soon the tech industry manages to wake up and realise that it's doing both itself and its customers a great disservice. Unfortunately, I am very concerned that process isn't going to be a pretty one, with the obscene amounts of money being thrown around for what, to the layman, very much appears to be products that don't actually exist.
What are we even doing any more?
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