Good night, Alexa: Voice assistants face deep cuts

A decade after voice assistant technology captured the world's imagination, Alexa and Siri appear to be on the wane. Alexa's rise and fall show that for every winner in the tech industry's neverending game of "dominate the next platform," there are multiple money-incinerating losers. Amid tech’s biggest slump in two decades, companies are tightening their belts and decreasing investments in secondary devices and voice assistants. Though voice assistants have become a literal fixture in millions of homes, they have not delivered on their creators' revenue targets. Voice assistants have also faced growing concerns over consumer privacy. A 2020 survey from DataGrail found that over 82 percent of respondents had concerns about monitoring or data collection from phone microphones, laptop webcams, home devices like Amazon Echo, or devices with location tracking.