Talking to Alexa is too often a one-sided affair. Certainly, the primary purpose of a digital assistant is to listen, but its responses tend to favor cold efficiency. If a human spoke to you the same way, you’d think they were being passive aggressive in order to get you to shut up and leave them alone.
To really take their usefulness to the next level, they have to understand the mood or even personality of the speaker apart from just understanding the words. Most of the Digital Assistants use Artificial Intelligence to understand to some degree, so only they can respond to the queries. However, that kind of contextual awareness doesn’t usually last beyond a couple of additional queries. Also, real, human conversations involve both parties often listening and speaking at the same time.
Digital assistants are really bad at all that subtle stuff that happens in normal conversations today. But Microsoft snuck out a recent announcement stating that gives us hope for the future. The company claims to have taken a big leap in conversational AI by introducing “full duplexing”. That means the ability to have a verbal conversation with an AI-driven assistant where it can speak and listen simultaneously. But full duplexing tech has the potential to make our interactions with digital assistants much more natural. You’ll be able to speak further instructions when the AI is in the middle of responding to something else.
