Microsoft CEO: Past digital assistant services, including Cortana, were “dumb as a rock”

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella criticized existing digital assistant services, including Cortana, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri, as being “dumb as a rock.” Nadella believes that most digital assistants are built on existing search technology and combine voice recognition and semantic understanding technology to “perceive” user requests, then find appropriate answers through search technology and respond to users in an appropriate manner, usually through presenting search results in list format, except for specific contexts where users use preset spoken ways to express.

On the other hand, current search services that incorporate generative AI technology allow the system to respond in a way that is closer to human-like, whether through input sentences or through interactive speech, even helping users plan travel itineraries or summarizing long content so that users can save time in organizing information while searching.

Therefore, in Nadella’s view, the new version of Bing search service, which integrates AI technology, will be more practical than the digital assistant services that have been introduced in the past, and will also change the search usage patterns that have hardly changed in the past.

In addition to Microsoft, industry players including Google have also begun to contemplate new search services, such as Google’s large language model LaMDA proposed last year, and the upcoming AI chatbot “Bard,” which will also change the user experience of existing search services.