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I can't speak for Cortana, but I have personal experience with Siri, Now, and Alexa. In terms of the actions that I do day-to-day (I would never ask for a dirty

by gervase 11y ago

I can't speak for Cortana, but I have personal experience with Siri, Now, and Alexa. In terms of the actions that I do day-to-day (I would never ask for a dirty joke, for example, but I ask for the weather daily), I would rank them Now, Alexa, and distant third, Siri. There are two axes that I care about - how many useful commands are available, and how well they can understand me. Google Now has a pretty wide range of behaviors, but it's the spooky-accurate voice recognition that sets it clearly ahead. In the last year, Google Now has only misunderstood me ONCE. Alexa also has a very wide range of behaviors (especially with the Skills), but I do occasionally run into things I feel like it should do that it doesn't (yet). To be fair, I also use her the most, so it could be that I push her further than the others. The voice recognition is quite good; I would say it misunderstands me less than 5 times in 100. Siri is by far the worst. Her abilities are limited, but worse, she has a tendency to funnel commands that she can't do into things she can. For example, asking for the hours of a restaurant will instead show you a Bing search (!) for the restaurant's name, sans hours. This is not useful. It would be better to just inform me that she can't do that yet, file that in a log at Apple, and then add that behavior some time down the road. She also mishears me 25-45% of the time, AND she seems to be getting worse over time. I assume this is because they are trying to widen her audience beyond a standard California accent, but it's incredibly frustrating for a product to get worse, not better, over time. I now use her only for voice dictation of texts on my iPhone, and use Google Now in app form exclusively for more advanced queries.

kuschku 11y ago
> Google Now has a pretty wide range of behaviors, but it's the spooky-accurate voice recognition that sets it clearly ahead. In the last year, Google Now has only misunderstood me ONCE. > She also mishears me 25-45% of the time, AND she seems to be getting worse over time. I assume this is because they are trying to widen her audience beyond a standard California accent, but it's incredibly frustrating for a product to get worse, not better, over time. I now use her only for voice dictation of texts on my iPhone, and use Google Now in app form exclusively for more advanced queries. And this is pretty much a huge issue for this market. Entry requires having already spent several billions on voice tech. You’d have to practically use all of YouTube as training set. Which Google did. Maybe someday we can have laws that require all neural networks trained with data from others to be in the public domain, even if the people providing training data agreed to the data being used for training. Then we could compete on other things than "understands voice".
- lgas 11y ago
  Well, until then, Google's speech recognition API is available (https://cloud.google.com/speech/ https://cloud.google.com/speech/) so it seems like it should be possible to at least compete at Google levels of SR without even having to understand what training data is.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    And how exactly am I supposed to do that without transferring userdata to a third party (like Google)? Privacy laws – which I personally like – prevent using that.
- shostack 11y ago
  "You’d have to practically use all of YouTube as training set. Which Google did." Didn't they use Google Voice as well?
  - manaus10 11y ago
    I hope not. That would be very creepy
  - brndn 11y ago
    I know they used 1-800-goog-411 [0], their discontinued free call directory service to train their speech recognition, which was a pretty great idea. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411
- Touche 11y ago
  Wait. So Google recognizes a long time ago that machine learning would be important to their business and so invests in a variety of projects to aid with that; Google 411, Google Books, etc. But because Apple either didn't have the foresight or chose not to invest in these technologies, Google should be forced to donate their data sets? To one of the richest companies in the world no less? throws up hands
  - 11y ago
lelandbatey 11y ago
Interesting that you rate Google Now as high as you do. I've had somewhat counter experiences. Specifically, both me and a friend decided to upgrade to Nexus 5X's this past month, he from an iPhone 4S, and I from a Moto G. Since I'm the one who's been using Android for longer, I've been his go to source for questions about the user experience, woe's about inconsistencies, and investigations on getting things done. What immediately became apparent is that apparently, the voice integration of Google Now seems quite terrible compared to Apple's Siri. I never use the voice features, but it turns out he is highly dependent on them, using Siri to transcribe most of his casual text interaction, control music, set timers, make quick appointments, and look up facts. However, when he moved to Google Now he found that while Google Now could in theory do all those same things, that it did so quite inconsistently (failing at minimum 5% of the time, up to 25% of the time). I tried and found the same problems. For example, I'd unlock my screen, swipe from the lower left to activate Google Now and then say "set an alarm for 10 minutes". Sometimes the little jiggling colored stripes would just never start moving, indicating that it didn't even engage the microphone. Other times it would catch what I say and correctly parse it, even responding "Ok, setting your alarm" and display the alarm card. However, it would never actually set the alarm. There are plenty of other inconsistencies encountered, this is just one that I experience frequently. My friend can go on for quite a while though about the issues he faces with Google Now. Anyway, has anyone else experienced issues like this one?

by gervase 11y ago

kuschku 11y ago

> Google Now has a pretty wide range of behaviors, but it's the spooky-accurate voice recognition that sets it clearly ahead. In the last year, Google Now has only misunderstood me ONCE. > She also mishears me 25-45% of the time, AND she seems to be getting worse over time. I assume this is because they are trying to widen her audience beyond a standard California accent, but it's incredibly frustrating for a product to get worse, not better, over time. I now use her only for voice dictation of texts on my iPhone, and use Google Now in app form exclusively for more advanced queries. And this is pretty much a huge issue for this market. Entry requires having already spent several billions on voice tech. You’d have to practically use all of YouTube as training set. Which Google did. Maybe someday we can have laws that require all neural networks trained with data from others to be in the public domain, even if the people providing training data agreed to the data being used for training. Then we could compete on other things than "understands voice".

lgas 11y ago
Well, until then, Google's speech recognition API is available (https://cloud.google.com/speech/ https://cloud.google.com/speech/) so it seems like it should be possible to at least compete at Google levels of SR without even having to understand what training data is.
- kuschku 11y ago
  And how exactly am I supposed to do that without transferring userdata to a third party (like Google)? Privacy laws – which I personally like – prevent using that.
shostack 11y ago
"You’d have to practically use all of YouTube as training set. Which Google did." Didn't they use Google Voice as well?
- manaus10 11y ago
  I hope not. That would be very creepy
- brndn 11y ago
  I know they used 1-800-goog-411 [0], their discontinued free call directory service to train their speech recognition, which was a pretty great idea. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411
Touche 11y ago
Wait. So Google recognizes a long time ago that machine learning would be important to their business and so invests in a variety of projects to aid with that; Google 411, Google Books, etc. But because Apple either didn't have the foresight or chose not to invest in these technologies, Google should be forced to donate their data sets? To one of the richest companies in the world no less? throws up hands
- 11y ago

lelandbatey 11y ago

Interesting that you rate Google Now as high as you do. I've had somewhat counter experiences. Specifically, both me and a friend decided to upgrade to Nexus 5X's this past month, he from an iPhone 4S, and I from a Moto G. Since I'm the one who's been using Android for longer, I've been his go to source for questions about the user experience, woe's about inconsistencies, and investigations on getting things done. What immediately became apparent is that apparently, the voice integration of Google Now seems quite terrible compared to Apple's Siri. I never use the voice features, but it turns out he is highly dependent on them, using Siri to transcribe most of his casual text interaction, control music, set timers, make quick appointments, and look up facts. However, when he moved to Google Now he found that while Google Now could in theory do all those same things, that it did so quite inconsistently (failing at minimum 5% of the time, up to 25% of the time). I tried and found the same problems. For example, I'd unlock my screen, swipe from the lower left to activate Google Now and then say "set an alarm for 10 minutes". Sometimes the little jiggling colored stripes would just never start moving, indicating that it didn't even engage the microphone. Other times it would catch what I say and correctly parse it, even responding "Ok, setting your alarm" and display the alarm card. However, it would never actually set the alarm. There are plenty of other inconsistencies encountered, this is just one that I experience frequently. My friend can go on for quite a while though about the issues he faces with Google Now. Anyway, has anyone else experienced issues like this one?