> But most people do, in exchange for their privacy and the value of their labor
I don't know. I'm not just talking about privacy -- voice assistants are hindered by compatibility problems between ecosystems, by limited functionality for most non-programming/engineering users, by a lack of common UX between assistants that makes them difficult to use, by a lack of reliability that blocks complex tasks, and by their general obtrusiveness.
My understanding is that usage numbers for voice assistants can be best described as a plurality[0], and that the majority of usage is common tasks like setting timers/reminders or hooking into Spotify. That's definitely not nothing, I wouldn't call voice assistants a failure on that front. But they're a far cry from the revolution in computing UX that they were initially chocked up to be; they continue to be (as far as I can tell) situationally useful tools with a lot of gimmicks tacked on. Other people's millage may vary though, I'm sure they've been transformative for some segment of the population -- but I'm not sure even the most useful features (hands free texting, etc...) are actually what I would call transformative as much as iterative improvements over existing UIs. They didn't take over the world or fundamentally change computing interfaces, in fact we're starting to see movement back towards integrating screens into smart homes now.
Add onto that the difficulties in properly monetizing them and the way that the technology was eventually consolidated into a couple of big competing ecosystems because of the difficulty of building/training them or building ecosystems around them -- these are issues that I suspect prevented the technology from ever being explored to its full potential. We don't know numbers for certain, but signs seem to point towards most voice assistants being at least borderline unprofitable[1]. My feeling is that the people investing in AI-chat models would be unhappy with an outcome that looks like this.
If AI generated content becomes a situationally useful tool that is very helpful in some scenarios but ends up being ignored for most complicated projects/tasks, then yeah, that's not nothing. But it's not really a creative revolution either, especially if it has the same monetization problems. And I suspect the monetization problems may end up being a lot worse, because the data collection and advertising opportunities for ChatGPT seem a lot more limited than they are for search engines or digital organizers, and (I assume) they'll be a lot more expensive per-query to host.
Some of this subjective; it's not like voice assistants are failures. But I feel like if we were to go back to 2014/15 and tell voice assistant advocates that they were going to eventually hit usage among maybe 60% of smartphone users, and would be primarily used as a text-to-speech engine and as a way to set timers, and that the biggest market leaders would still be unprofitable in 2023 -- I think people back then would have regarded that as a pessimistic take about the technology.
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[0]: https://voicebot.ai/2020/11/05/voice-assistant-use-on-smartp...
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...