People use smart assistants for weather, timers, and music — the same stuff we were doing a decade ago

Google, Amazon, and Apple are all upgrading their digital assistants — Assistant, Alexa, and Siri — to use more advanced generative-AI technology. The problem has been that even as they promise new and better capabilities, these tools for now have lost some of their initial functionality, and companies are struggling to make everything work as advertised.

So far the changes haven’t meant much to regular users.

New data from survey company YouGov shows that for the most part, people still mainly use smart/voice/digital assistants for the same stuff they did when these companies first demoed them about a decade ago: checking the weather, playing music, and setting timers. There’s slight variation by age group, but the overall pattern holds.

Back in 2018, I made pretty much the same chart as above using Adobe data — and it looks roughly the same.

What’s going on?

Some 27% of smart assistant users said their main problem with the technology is that it doesn’t understand their requests, while another 12% cited a lack of accuracy and another 10% said digital assistants aren’t as smart as they expected them to be.

Those are big obstacles to overcome if people are ever supposed to trust these assistants enough for them to become more deeply integrated into our lives and do more important work than telling us the weather.