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When Amazon launched Alexa five years ago, it had the tech industry praising it to the high heavens at what then was a groundbreaking, even startling innovation. Alexa ignited a new market for virtual assistants and had Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft rushing to improve their AI offerings through extensive research on speech recognition. It is no secret that these very same companies in the race to create the most accurate and attentive virtual assistant, from Siri to Bixby - employed hundreds of operatives just to listen and decipher human voices.

Yet these virtual assistants still don’t quite get it. Not for someone who owns an iPhone in China nor for someone who got that Alexa speaker from Indonesia – virtual assistant is not made for an international environment that is rich with such a multitude of different accents, nuances, and intonation. As for our friends with regional American or British twangs, could it be said that the likes of Siri and Alexa perform better if spoken with a recognized speech? Not even. Most users claim that even the simplest tasks seem to confuse Alexa or Siri; for example, if one asked about how the weather is, or should you want to book a flight from the UK to Madrid, then better to do it yourself through the airline website rather than delegating that task to Alexa. Just waiting for her/he/it to respond takes a mind-numbing tedious, lengthy time.

So, for the Alexas, Siris, and Bixbys – these are but virtual assistants that in the novelty rather entertain at first but fail to be a productive tool for the home or the office. Better yet, pick up your phone or tablet and find it out yourself.

The case for a virtual assistant is just one of the few considerations that establishes our case that a truly functioning AI has not yet fully arrived. That Jarvis in those Iron Man movies is still a fictional frame of thought and may take a great deal more time for it to come to real life.

Another AI derivative going nowhere seems to be Uber’s and Tesla’s big plans for driverless cars. That project has been in the very slow lane for some time – as it is tough to sell the idea that a driverless car is a safer car. With all the test and studies done, some driverless vehicles powered by AI could still not make sense of things in or on the road – then headlines of more crashes of driverless cars heading safely [NOT] to their destinations, and Tesla still stuck with issues of vehicles spontaneously combusting. Despite claims from Uber and Tesla that driverless cars will be perfectly safe sometime soon in the future, a University of Michigan study in 2015 claimed that driverless cars had more accidents than human-driven ones. In 2018, a self-driving Uber car killed a pedestrian in Arizona. So, there you have it, we are doubtful if governments will even allow the deployment of AI-powered driverless vehicles.

In this world of AI, we think there is one critical factor in fastening the speed of how these self-thinking machines will process information. That factor is something we can all watch out for, and one that perfectly blends with AI – 5G Technology.

And China is the front-runner in 5G.