Hey Alexa, Siri want to impress me?

My wife has already had it with digital assistants. Alexa seems to wake up to the inflections of her Irish accent. Siri to mis-pressed buttons in the car or her phone.

I am a bit more patient but I also expect just a bit more. Here’s a few recent episodes where I could have used an assistant

- On a long drive I wanted to hear the NFL Bucs game. So I scanned the AM channel spectrum on the radio. No luck. That’s where all the sports and talk shows reside, don’t they? About to give up I stopped and Googled and found it on a FM station. Would have been nice to just say “Siri, play the Bucs game”

- During the ALCS game last week, I saw the game was on FS1. Tried the cable channel. They had our hockey team playing. I tried Fox, ESPN, other channels. No luck. Tried the Fox to Go app on the tablet. No luck. Downloaded the MLB At Bat app – only had a radio broadcast. Finally signed up for a trial subscription to Fubo TV and watched the game on my laptop. Would have been nice to just yell at Alexa on my Fire TV Stick “Play the baseball game” and for it to be smart enough to say “Now make sure and cancel the trial Fubo subscription. It’s not cheap at $ 39.95 a month”

- Avis rented me a Volvo XC60. I swear it took me 10 minutes to punch in the address on the nav using the buttons on the console. A touch screen would have been nice. Even better I should have just dictated the address to the car’s assistant. More recently one of their Toyota RAV4s displayed a steaming coffee cup message suggesting I take a break from driving. I would have liked for it to have answered my question “Is that because I have been driving too long, or do the sensors on the steering wheel suggest I am swaying too much?”

Our expectations are about to explode.

• Independently, our two kids setting up new places went and bought TCL TVs with built in Roku. It’s their gateway to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Videos, YouTube Red and who knows what else. We are going to need assistants to help us navigate all the choices. Accessible via our remote controls.
• The Smart Home is starting to take shape. Video Doorbells, Smart Sprinklers, Keyless Locks and many other devices are populating our homes. We will need assistants to help configure and repair them. Accessible via speakers.
• My wife and I have different Hyundai SUVs. The rear camera display is different, the proximity sensors set off alarms at different times, the navigation system UX is almost completely different. Same manufacturer, same feature sets. Now extrapolate that to all the new safety features as carmakers roll out the many driver assistance features already available in the Audi Q7. We will need assistants to guide us through these choices. Accessible, right there, in our cars.

As we have seen over and over in the last decade what we experience at home influences our expectations of enterprise tech. They are already starting to introduce their own assistants like SAP with CoPilot. They will be expected to navigate many more systems to find us answers. And we will expect them to be accessible in our offices, our cars, our flights and our homes.

Alexa, can you please show me your future?