TL;DR: Why does everyone get lost on their way to lunch?

You know what it’s like, right? You’re on your way to lunch with Suzie, and you want to let her know you’re running late. Bixby will allow you to take a screenshot of the map showing your location and send it to her.

Because this happens every day, right? Pardon me for being a little salty here, but no, this doesn’t happen every day. In fact, it happens rarely. If I’m having lunch with someone, I get there on time. If I’m running late, I don’t send her a screenshot of a map showing my location. I’m not going to make her play the “Guess my commute” game. She has to calculate my position in relation to hers, do some algorithmic math factoring in average walking speed, wind direction, incline. No, hell no. I just text her with “be there in 10.”

But if you listen to every assistant maker out there – Bixby, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana – this is apparently a really crushing problem that needs millions of lines of code and a learning engine to solve. Every demo of a personal assistant that I can remember has shown our protagonist going to lunch with someone, and some magical way to tell her (it’s usually a her, but that’s a different editorial) that you’re an idiot who didn’t bother to look up where the lunch place is or how to get there before you left.

Seriously Google, Samsung, Apple, everyone – this is a tired scenario which happens to literally no one. Find a new shiny object to dangle in front of your audiences please. If the best way you can sum up what your assistant does is SMSing a screenshot to someone who’s already mad at you, then your assistant sucks.

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