Making the best of your voice-based AI assistants

New-gen assistants can interpret the subtleties of human speech, including tone, inflection, and emotion

- Abhishek Baxi

In the 2013 movie Her, a lonely man develops a deep emotional connection with his virtual assistant, Samantha—an advanced AI operating system with a voice, personality, and the ability to learn and evolve. A decade later, we're almost there.

It isn't just about setting alarms or adding milk to your shopping list anymore; it's about unlocking a new dimension of human-AI interaction, one where creativity flows, productivity soars, and the line between tool and companion becomes delightfully ambiguous. And now that AI-powered experiences are increasingly ubiquitous, voice-based AI assistants are emerging as transformative tools, redefining how humans interact with machines.

Unlike their chat-based counterparts, voice-enabled AI assistants like ChatGPT Voice by OpenAI, Copilot Voice by Microsoft, and Gemini Live by Google are designed to streamline communication, offering hands-free, natural, and more intuitive interactions.

While both voice-based AI assistants and AI chatbots utilize natural language processing (NLP) to understand and respond to user requests, their interaction methods differ significantly. Chatbots rely on text-based input and output, confining users to a typed interface (pretty much like a typical web search, only better). While effective for precise tasks and complex problem-solving, typing queries can be cumbersome, especially in dynamic or hands-free scenarios.

That obvious distinction aside, the new-gen assistants are designed to engage in more dynamic and nuanced conversations (upping the ante from what was possible with older voice assistants like Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alex, and Google Assistant).