To be honest with you, if you look at the technology as a whole, I prefer what we had in 2001.
Back then it was completely unusable (as opposed to now, where it's only borderline unusable), but at least it wasn't shoved down your throat by smartphone manufacturers and Google.
I'm assuming you're a non-native speaker? The definite article "the" indicates that I'm talking specifically about voice recognition technology.
Of course other areas have improved peoples' lives in meaningful ways, such as C++11 and video streaming (although I'd argue Zoom is worse than the telephone in almost every instance it's deployed).
