Microsoft’s Satya Nadella says voice assistants Siri, Alexa, Cortana are 'dumb as a rock'

Satya Nadella called the first wave of voice assistants like Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and even Microsoft's own Cortana "dumb as a rock," at a time when generative artificial intelligence (AI) has been the talk of the town.

The Microsoft CEO had, in a 2016 keynote speech, outlined that Cortana could be used as a digital assistant and that "bots are the new apps". He, however, told Financial Times recently that his opinion has changed since then.

"They were all dumb as a rock," he told the publication. "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."

Launched in 2014, Cortana functioned as a virtual productivity assistant that could respond to prompts, organise meetings, and create reminders amongst other features. But since Microsoft had to rely more on third parties to integrate Cortana, its progress was poor unlike Apple's Siri and Google's Alexa. Quoting its 2018's analysis, Business Insider reported that only just 2 percent of global consumers said they used Cortana as their primary voice assistant.