About what a truly useful AI voice assistant should be able to do.
Has this happened?
Yes 87 (65%)Not sure 20 (15%)No 27 (20%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About what a truly useful AI voice assistant should be able to do.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Transcription is a hard problem but it's pretty closed to solved. The unsolved problem is telling an voice assistant to do something useful and having it do it. An AI assistant would be something that could act on "Book me a trip to Tokyo and inform the relevant people," not interacting with a spoken command line, invoking some API by voice, or laboriously filling out a form by talking to a computer.