That triggered something which made me finally understand why I felt uncomfortable about the Jibo when I first skimmed its web page yesterday. Now I can put my finger on the issue:

Voice-interactive computer systems are difficult to get working correctly. All of the existing systems like Siri/Cortana have severe problems which they're working to correct, a little at a time. Issues with mistakes in the actual speech recognition, the inability to perform all of the actions that you might want or expect them to do, and especially the inability to glean the context of the conversation, are all still sticking points which are going to take a lot of time, research, retry, and coding work to get around. Right now, that limits what I can do with those systems. Right now, I use Siri pretty much only for setting alarms, because that's one of the few things where it's easier and quicker with Siri. And even then she gets it wrong sometimes!

This is a hard problem to solve, and the people working on Siri, Cortana, Google Now, and Jibo, are all working separately, in competition with each other, rather than pooling their knowledge. If they were working together, we could advance the state of the art in speech recognition much faster. But even if they were working together, it's still a hard set of problems to solve and it will take time to get things right. The fact that we've got these things on our phones now, and we're slowly easing into being able to sometimes use these things, is helping them advance the state of the art a little at a time. The only reason I'm using Siri right now is because she came with my phone, not because I set out to "buy Siri". I wanted the phone for other reasons, Siri is just an extra feature. One with a very narrow range of usefulness that they're working to expand, a little at a time.

So my particular problem with Jibo is the price tag: It feels like they're promising that the extra expense will result in better voice recognition. As if somehow the higher price tag magically makes Jibo's voice recognition better than Siri. But that's not how it works.

I'm sure that's not what Jibo's makers intended. I'm sure they are a hard working team who wants nothing more than to deliver the most amazing voice-interactive experience the world has ever seen. They want to create something awesome, and they have their own vision which is different from Apple's or Microsoft's. My point here is just that I had a specific negative reaction to seeing their web page and their price tag, and it was a subtle thing, and it took a while to understand why and be able to put into words. My initial reaction was that I couldn't imagine spending that much money to help them fund their voice recognition research.

I've got nothing against spending extra money for a particular product of course. I bought the quite-expensive empeg because it was, and still is 15 years later, the best possible in-car MP3 player. Though it was expensive, at the time I bought it, it solved a problem that no other product could at the time (all my songs in the car), and it did so in such an advanced and forward-thinking way that today I still prefer its feature set to any current product which can solve the same problem (like... my phone ).