Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella slams voice assistants, says Cortana, Siri and Alexa are dumb as a rock

By Divyanshi SharmaMicrosoft was making a lot of headlines a couple of days back due to its latest AI-powered product, the all new Bing chatbot. The AI chatbot gave access of the chatbot to a limited number of people at first, and it soon went rogue and was in the news for its bizarre responses to people. The Microsoft team seems to have tamed the chatbot now and has also restricted its chat limit. However, generative AI isn’t a new concept as voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Microsoft also use AI technologies.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, in an interview with Financial Times, talked about the first voice assistants– Cortana, Alexa and Siri– and said that they were all ‘dumb as a rock’.

Satya Nadella calls Alexa, Siri, Cortana ‘dumb as a rock’

Apple’s Siri, Google’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana are used by people even today. However, Satya Nadella, in an interview with Financial Times last month, said that they “were all dumb as a rock.”

The CEO added, “Whether it’s Cortana or Alexa or Google Assistant or Siri, all these just don’t work. We had a product that was supposed to be the new front-end to a lot of [information] that didn’t work.”

In 2014, Microsoft had introduced Cortana as an inbuilt AI assistant who could aid users with a number of tasks such as organising their meetings, creating reminders, helping with search, and so on. However, the voice assistant wasn’t a popular choice on smartphones.

Alexa, on the other hand, was introduced in November 2014 and Apple’s Siri was unveiled as part of iPhone 4S’ feature in 2011.

Satya Nadella on competing with Google

After the launch of the new Bing, In an interview with The Verge, Satya Nadella had said that having a healthy competition in the search market will not only mean more money for them, but for publishers and advertisers as well. He further said that when it comes to the search engine market, Google is the ‘800 pound gorilla on this’ but with the innovation that Microsoft brings, they (Google) will definitely want to come out and ‘dance’.

He said, “First of all I have the greatest of admirations for Google and what they’ve done. They’re unbelievable with great talent. I have a lot of respect for Sundar Pichai and his team.I just want us to innovate. Today was the day when we brought some more competition to search. We’ve been at it, believe me, I’ve been at it for twenty years and I’ve been waiting for it. But at the end of the day, they are the 800 pound gorilla on this which is what they are and I hope that with our innovation they will definitely want to come out and show that they can dance and I want people to know that we made them dance and I think that will be a great day.”

He also said that even though Google dominates the market by a ‘significant margin, having other competitors will mean an evenly spread search share which will help publishers get traffic from multiple sources’.