SMART AIDES WE LEAN ON

Combining voice recognition and generative AI, smart assistants have seduced millions of Indians with a wide variety of practical—and even emotional—help they offer. However, privacy concerns remain a serious worry

- By Sonali Acharjee | Illustration by Nilanjan Das

First, there was the simple voice assistant, exemplified by the earliest Alexa, straining its ears to understand and play a song of one's choice or fetch basic information. Now, added with the aggregative and in-terpretative power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools like machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), your voice as-sistants have just become smarter. And, with these assistants embedded in their capacious smartphones, Indians are em-bracing their seemingly all-encompassing companionship. It seems natural to those who turn to this new league of voice as-sistants powered by generative AI—which use neural networks to identify patterns and structures within existing text, im-age, audio and video data to generate new content—for just about everything. From weekly shopping lists to counting calories on their plate and crafting arguments—nothing is beyond its ken.