It's unmitigated infantilism. Outside of the physically disabled, who would need such a feature? Is touching your phone to make a call less convenient than speaking to it? If touching your phone is so inconvenient, then why do most adults spend hours per day on their phones?
What most of these sorts of features do is not to add convenience; instead they remove the need to exercise impulse control. They reduce "friction," which means you do the action more often. But they don't improve convenience. Convenience is not needing to walk outside to the well to fetch a bucket of water. It's not someone making an app so automatic that you no longer need to use your executive function.
There are lots of situations where touching the phone is not possible or not ideal. For instance, when you're working with your hands and they are dirty, you might not want to get your phone dirty as well. Or the other way around, you might not want to touch your contaminated phone while handling food.
I sometimes use Siri to set timers while cooking. Unfortunately, adding items to the shopping list doesn't work well enough, Classic Siri is not smart enough to place them in the food section.
Just no good reason. No reason why someone would actually need one. It's like an automatic lift-gate motor in an SUV. It's not more convenient. Pressing a button to close your trunk is only more convenient than manually closing your trunk if you have a physical disability. And in the long term, it's less convenient: you actually don't have the option of closing it manually removed since this is bad for the motor. If the motor fails in the wrong position, then your trunk may be stuck open. Replacing an old-fashioned piston on a trunk is cheap an easy. Replacing an internal motor is much more expensive and is beyond the skillset of most people.
A voice assistant is similar in an analogous way. A button works every time you press it, but a voice assistant works very sporadically. It's hardly convenient to repeat yourself frequently and randomly. A voice assistant requires internet access, which wastes your data (again, when you could have just pressed a button) and the quality of the voice assistant will change over time. It's less consistent, more expensive, and more complex. And for what? So you can use your phone more often? You already use your phone too much.
Funny, my Rivian assistant is more useful for this use case than Siri
I did some side by side navigation queries and was surprised how much more I preferred the responses from a company that isn’t even really trying to be a major AI player
if people find a feature for the physically disabled useful they'll use it. should manufacturers ship disabled-only versions with those features enabled and disable them in the other devices?
What most of these sorts of features do is not to add convenience; instead they remove the need to exercise impulse control. They reduce "friction," which means you do the action more often. But they don't improve convenience. Convenience is not needing to walk outside to the well to fetch a bucket of water. It's not someone making an app so automatic that you no longer need to use your executive function.