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My fiance and I have just finished serving up a plate of food for dinner. We go and sit down on the couch and want to start eating, but someone has to futz arou

My fiance and I have just finished serving up a plate of food for dinner. We go and sit down on the couch and want to start eating, but someone has to futz around with their phone for a couple of minutes to get an episode of TV to play while their food gets cold. After getting a home one of us can just say "Ok google, play The Next Generation from Netflix on the TV" while walking towards the couch. It plays the next episode right were we left off yesterday. One of us gets up to go to the toilet, normally it means screwing around with the phone, and oh look, the chromecast disconnected from the phone so we have to reconnect again. It's easy to spend a whole minute just to get the damn episode to pause. After getting a home it's just a matter of saying "Ok google, pause the TV"

danieldk 10y ago
One of us gets up to go to the toilet, normally it means screwing around with the phone, and oh look, the chromecast disconnected from the phone so we have to reconnect again. It's easy to spend a whole minute just to get the damn episode to pause. Reality: if you have a slightly non-standard accent, you will be shouting at your device five times before anything happens. While I could just have pressed the play button on my Apple TV remote and be done with it (no fiddling with a phone necessary). Then there are all kinds of cultural realities that are apparently not considered in Silicon Valley. My favorite five pet peeves: (1) Our family name is 'de Kok'. Very often these assistants totally mess up when I ask e.g. to call family (either they start complaining about dirty language or literally search for 'cock'). (2) We are a multilingual family, languages used in our household are German, Dutch, and sometimes English. None of these voice assistants work with multiple languages. So, the only alternative is to choose one language and stick with it. Unfortunately, if you choose English you are having a hard time navigating in Germany, looking up a German TV program, or calling a Dutch or German friend. If you set the language to German, you forgo looking up shows on Netflix by their English titles reliably. (3) Usability goes down the drain once you have kids. Voice assistants typically do not work well when multiple people are speaking at the same time. If you are lucky, they are just confused, if you are unlucky they start doing whatever they infer from a semi-random mix of words. You cannot tell your three year old to be quiet, because mom or dad has to tell Siri what to do. (I use Siri sometimes, and our daughter currently likes to scream 'hey siri' repeatedly when I use Siri.) (4) Voice assistants are unusable in most environments where there are other people. (5) Voice assistants, especially in-house voice assistants are a potential privacy violation. So, you have to ask people that visit you if they are OK with your conversations being recorded (accidentally or intentionally) and switch off the device if they do mind the latent spying. tl;dr: voice assistants only work well in monolingual families where all of the family members have a perfect accent and where none of your acquaintances mind the privacy violations. Edit: added some more annoyances. Edit 2: heavy downvoting :/. Please explain why!
- JetSpiegel 10y ago
  > voice assistants only work well in monolingual families where all of the family members have a perfect accent and where none of your acquaintances mind the privacy violations. So, bachelor Silicon Valley engineers.
- jorvi 10y ago
  Exactly this. And you're getting downvoted because it works for people in their situation, so either you must be lying or you must be using it wrong.
  - xbmcuser 10y ago
    I had hard time getting Google to understand my speech 2 years ago. These days the error rate has come down a lot. From 60-70% to around 95-96%. For me Google home won't be worth it till it reaches more than 99% accuracy but as more people use it the accuracy increases
  - tossaway1 10y ago
    Uh, or it just doesn't work perfectly in all situations or for all people. That's true of most products.
- vidarh 10y ago
  > Reality: if you have a slightly non-standard accent, you will be shouting at your device five times before anything happens. I don't know about Google Home or Siri, but my Alexa easily handles my broad Norwegian accent the vast majority of the time. There are a few things (e.g. weird album titles) that are more likely to cause problems, but in my experience the things that it has problems with are rarely accent related as when something is problematic my son who does not have a comparable accent runs into the same misrecognition. (EDIT: I have no doubt that there are accents it will have problems with - my point is that you certainly don't need to have perfect pronunciation for this any more) > While I could just have pressed the play button on my Apple TV remote and be done with it (no fiddling with a phone necessary). That requires finding the remote first. You may be organized enough for that never to be an issue. I've given up on the normal remote and rely exclusively on apps now, but that also involves grabbing my phone or tablet and a couple extra steps. > (4) Voice assistants are unusable in most environments where there are other people. That's fine. They don't need to be usable everywhere. I have no interest in using one on my phone in public for example. But I like having one in my living room, and I rarely have enough people around that it's a problem. In my experience with it so far, people have already learned to hush down automatically when they hear you give the keyword (but I do agree that won't work with a lot of people present - it works with a few people around).
NumberCruncher 10y ago
Thanks god Alexa and G Home solves all of our first word problems caused by our laziness and digital addiction. There were times I thought the Cyberpunk motto "High Tech, Low Life" would be just a joke.
- tempodox 10y ago
  Maybe you should add a rock of salt, or two. I read the GP's description as sarcasm. Even an iPad offers a better experience than what they describe. Or they're on Android. Still, the cyberpunk motto is bound to become true.
Cthulhu_ 10y ago
Back in my day, we had a device that had a dedicated button for 'pause'. It worked using infrared, a simple invisible light system that doesn't need pairing or a wifi connection. The device (called a "remote control") could also run for years on a single AA battery, using little to no power when no buttons were pressed. The downside was that it had a lot of buttons, 90% of which you don't use. It also tended to get lost a lot. And we didn't have Netflix, so either we'd have to use video tapes (which was cool, insert and hit play), or DVDs (which were a bit less usable, they usually had unskippable warnings, trailers, and some weird menu you had to get through before playing the movie / TV show). Or just watch what was on TV at the time, which worked just fine for us because we'd eat and go to bed at set times. My tl;dr point is that things just used to be simpler and more usable. I don't like having to use an app to start stuff. I don't like the four remotes I have lying around atm either (TV, set-top box for digital television, one for the soundbar (idk why it's that big), and either a controller for the ps4 or for the apple TV. The latter two kinda fulfill the same role though, as a netflix machine.
- cylinder 10y ago
  I have no interest in these smart home devices and I'm not a Luddite. These things just complicate life. Just like my fancy new dishwasher which thinks it's a good idea to beep constantly once my dishes finish washing at 1am.
  - HelloMcFly 10y ago
    If it complicates your life, it's a bad device. My Echo does not do that, but that's probably because I only have a limited number of things I really want it to do, and it does them just fine.
  - teh_klev 10y ago
    My sodding washing machine does this after completing a washing programme and there's no way to disable it. Seriously, does the manufacturer think I'm going to completely forget I needed clean clothes and bedding for the week? I also notice my new microwave sits there and keeps chirping at me after heating food until I open the door, it's not as loud and as insistent as the washing machine, but still totally unnecessary behaviour. A more sensitive soul could eventually be driven bonkers if every flippin' thing in your house and car beeped and booped at you every minute of the day.
stuaxo 10y ago
Every time I've tried setting stuff up to be controlled by a phone it's been a massive faff, so not surprising anything is better than that. The smart-tv is almost as bad, I'm just going to connect an actual computer to the TV and be done.
tempodox 10y ago
I take it, “getting a home” is the hard part here. The good news is, the gadgets also work inside cardboard boxes.

danieldk 10y ago

One of us gets up to go to the toilet, normally it means screwing around with the phone, and oh look, the chromecast disconnected from the phone so we have to reconnect again. It's easy to spend a whole minute just to get the damn episode to pause. Reality: if you have a slightly non-standard accent, you will be shouting at your device five times before anything happens. While I could just have pressed the play button on my Apple TV remote and be done with it (no fiddling with a phone necessary). Then there are all kinds of cultural realities that are apparently not considered in Silicon Valley. My favorite five pet peeves: (1) Our family name is 'de Kok'. Very often these assistants totally mess up when I ask e.g. to call family (either they start complaining about dirty language or literally search for 'cock'). (2) We are a multilingual family, languages used in our household are German, Dutch, and sometimes English. None of these voice assistants work with multiple languages. So, the only alternative is to choose one language and stick with it. Unfortunately, if you choose English you are having a hard time navigating in Germany, looking up a German TV program, or calling a Dutch or German friend. If you set the language to German, you forgo looking up shows on Netflix by their English titles reliably. (3) Usability goes down the drain once you have kids. Voice assistants typically do not work well when multiple people are speaking at the same time. If you are lucky, they are just confused, if you are unlucky they start doing whatever they infer from a semi-random mix of words. You cannot tell your three year old to be quiet, because mom or dad has to tell Siri what to do. (I use Siri sometimes, and our daughter currently likes to scream 'hey siri' repeatedly when I use Siri.) (4) Voice assistants are unusable in most environments where there are other people. (5) Voice assistants, especially in-house voice assistants are a potential privacy violation. So, you have to ask people that visit you if they are OK with your conversations being recorded (accidentally or intentionally) and switch off the device if they do mind the latent spying. tl;dr: voice assistants only work well in monolingual families where all of the family members have a perfect accent and where none of your acquaintances mind the privacy violations. Edit: added some more annoyances. Edit 2: heavy downvoting :/. Please explain why!

JetSpiegel 10y ago
> voice assistants only work well in monolingual families where all of the family members have a perfect accent and where none of your acquaintances mind the privacy violations. So, bachelor Silicon Valley engineers.
jorvi 10y ago
Exactly this. And you're getting downvoted because it works for people in their situation, so either you must be lying or you must be using it wrong.
- xbmcuser 10y ago
  I had hard time getting Google to understand my speech 2 years ago. These days the error rate has come down a lot. From 60-70% to around 95-96%. For me Google home won't be worth it till it reaches more than 99% accuracy but as more people use it the accuracy increases
- tossaway1 10y ago
  Uh, or it just doesn't work perfectly in all situations or for all people. That's true of most products.
vidarh 10y ago
> Reality: if you have a slightly non-standard accent, you will be shouting at your device five times before anything happens. I don't know about Google Home or Siri, but my Alexa easily handles my broad Norwegian accent the vast majority of the time. There are a few things (e.g. weird album titles) that are more likely to cause problems, but in my experience the things that it has problems with are rarely accent related as when something is problematic my son who does not have a comparable accent runs into the same misrecognition. (EDIT: I have no doubt that there are accents it will have problems with - my point is that you certainly don't need to have perfect pronunciation for this any more) > While I could just have pressed the play button on my Apple TV remote and be done with it (no fiddling with a phone necessary). That requires finding the remote first. You may be organized enough for that never to be an issue. I've given up on the normal remote and rely exclusively on apps now, but that also involves grabbing my phone or tablet and a couple extra steps. > (4) Voice assistants are unusable in most environments where there are other people. That's fine. They don't need to be usable everywhere. I have no interest in using one on my phone in public for example. But I like having one in my living room, and I rarely have enough people around that it's a problem. In my experience with it so far, people have already learned to hush down automatically when they hear you give the keyword (but I do agree that won't work with a lot of people present - it works with a few people around).

NumberCruncher 10y ago

Thanks god Alexa and G Home solves all of our first word problems caused by our laziness and digital addiction. There were times I thought the Cyberpunk motto "High Tech, Low Life" would be just a joke.

tempodox 10y ago
Maybe you should add a rock of salt, or two. I read the GP's description as sarcasm. Even an iPad offers a better experience than what they describe. Or they're on Android. Still, the cyberpunk motto is bound to become true.

Cthulhu_ 10y ago

Back in my day, we had a device that had a dedicated button for 'pause'. It worked using infrared, a simple invisible light system that doesn't need pairing or a wifi connection. The device (called a "remote control") could also run for years on a single AA battery, using little to no power when no buttons were pressed. The downside was that it had a lot of buttons, 90% of which you don't use. It also tended to get lost a lot. And we didn't have Netflix, so either we'd have to use video tapes (which was cool, insert and hit play), or DVDs (which were a bit less usable, they usually had unskippable warnings, trailers, and some weird menu you had to get through before playing the movie / TV show). Or just watch what was on TV at the time, which worked just fine for us because we'd eat and go to bed at set times. My tl;dr point is that things just used to be simpler and more usable. I don't like having to use an app to start stuff. I don't like the four remotes I have lying around atm either (TV, set-top box for digital television, one for the soundbar (idk why it's that big), and either a controller for the ps4 or for the apple TV. The latter two kinda fulfill the same role though, as a netflix machine.

cylinder 10y ago
I have no interest in these smart home devices and I'm not a Luddite. These things just complicate life. Just like my fancy new dishwasher which thinks it's a good idea to beep constantly once my dishes finish washing at 1am.
- HelloMcFly 10y ago
  If it complicates your life, it's a bad device. My Echo does not do that, but that's probably because I only have a limited number of things I really want it to do, and it does them just fine.
- teh_klev 10y ago
  My sodding washing machine does this after completing a washing programme and there's no way to disable it. Seriously, does the manufacturer think I'm going to completely forget I needed clean clothes and bedding for the week? I also notice my new microwave sits there and keeps chirping at me after heating food until I open the door, it's not as loud and as insistent as the washing machine, but still totally unnecessary behaviour. A more sensitive soul could eventually be driven bonkers if every flippin' thing in your house and car beeped and booped at you every minute of the day.

stuaxo 10y ago

Every time I've tried setting stuff up to be controlled by a phone it's been a massive faff, so not surprising anything is better than that. The smart-tv is almost as bad, I'm just going to connect an actual computer to the TV and be done.

tempodox 10y ago

I take it, “getting a home” is the hard part here. The good news is, the gadgets also work inside cardboard boxes.