This bit from Raluca Budiu and Page Laubheimer’s user study of digital assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri echoes my thoughts exactly on why I don’t like interacting with them:
Many participants started speaking before formulating the query completely (as you would normally do with a human), and occasionally paused searching for the best word. Such pauses are natural in conversation, but assistants did not interpret them correctly and often rushed to respond. Of course, answers to such incomplete queries were incorrect most of the time, and the overall effect was unpleasant: participants complained that they were interrupted, that the assistant “talked over them”, or that the assistant was “rude.” Some even went as far as to explicitly scold the assistant for it (“Alexa, that’s rude!”).
Yep. When I interact with voice UIs I spend way more time and energy planning the exact sentence construction and pronunciation than when I simply type and swipe and figure it out as I go. And then, if one word is out of place, the whole thing falls apart. It’s just too stressful. I can’t.