Why I won’t be using digital assistants such as Cortana anytime soon

Apple users have Siri, Android users Google Now and Microsoft customers get Cortana with the release of Windows 10.

These voice-activated digital assistants work all in the same way. You activate them either with an activation phrase or by performing some form of action. Once activated, they accept voice input, interpret it and produce an output for you.

Siri, where is the next Mc Donalds, Ok Google, give me a weather report for today, Cortana, who won the Superbowl in 2013.

All of these questions and many more can be asked and the digital assistants will produce an answer that is often spot on.

The relatively new feature has its advantages. You can look something up without using your hands and it works considerably well for questions that have only one valid answer.

This means that questions such as "what is the best football team in the world", "should I wear black or blue to work today" or "is Assassins Creed Unity a good game" won't produce valid answers for some.

We are far away from communicating with AI that is as capable as the droids in Star Wars or other Science Fiction movies.

While I do believe that this can become a great thing in the distant future, it is more of a gimmick right now in my opinion.

Here are reasons why I won't be using digital assistants anytime soon:

1. The assistants are limited right now and while they provide answers for basic questions they understand, there is a lot that they can't do for you just now or don't understand.
2. There is no way to train them yourself. What I mean by that is to make them learn things that are outside their scope. You cannot program the assistant on your own.
3. The need to speak to the device works if you are alone or in a small group, but it is far from ideal if you are in a crowded place. I'm not only talking about speech recognition but also disturbing others by speaking to your device in public.
4. Your commands are processed remotely which means that whatever you or anyone near you says at the time is transferred to a remote server for analysis.

All are valid in my opinion. As far as 1) is concerned: I cannot think of a single situation in my life where a voice activated assistant would be useful. I'm not driving cars which is the only situation that I can think of where this may come in handy if you need information right at that point in time.

I'm not saying that they cannot be useful in situations for some people but for me it seems to be mostly hype at this point in time.