Ten years ago a new and promising technology burst into our homes – the smart speaker. Like many tech-forward families, our household went all in. We got two Alexa speakers and two Google Homes, plugged them in, and they became fixtures in our kitchen and bedrooms for years.
Problem is, we kind of hate them now. At first they were cool – it was novel to talk to a device and have it actually work, at least for simple tasks like “what’s the weather today” or “play Vampire Weekend.” But we quickly grew disaffected with our new purchases, because more often than not, they failed when presented with even moderately complicated queries like “what time is the Giants game tonight” or “what’s on my grocery list.” In short, the first generation of smart home speakers were limited by a rigid approach to “intelligence” that didn’t scale. Only one sad, bedraggled Google Home remains in service in our kitchen, serving as a glorified clock radio (that’s it in the picture above). And it’s not doing Google any favors in the branding department, because whenever we ask it anything even slightly complicated, it fails, earning a string of expletives in the process*.
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