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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 r

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).
- lightedman 10y ago
  "That requires finding the remote first." My TV is so old the remote is still wired to it. Finding the remote is never an issue.
morganvachon 10y ago
> "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." Indeed, and "perfect accent" varies from device to device. My wife and I are both from the Atlanta, Georgia area, yet we have distinctive accents; hers is much more "Southern" than mine as I grew up in several different states across the Southeast and Southwest, whereas she lived in the same house from birth to college, then moved back after graduating. We've found that her Nexus 6 understands me better than her even though she talks to it far more often than I do, and the reverse is true for our Shield TV despite it using the same backend as the phone. She has to try two or three times to get her phone to understand a command, where I can get it right the first time. On the Shield, I will tell YouTube to look for "funny cat videos" and I get "funny hat videos" every damn time, while she gets cats.
arjie 10y ago
Dude, I can ask my phone to show me information about Vishwaroopam and then navigate to Bermondsey station and then search for Taqueria Guadalajara right after. I literally just did it. At some point you're going to have to face a fact: you're an irrelevant minority. That doesn't mean that the tool only supports a narrow use case. In my case, I found a way to my Tube station in London, information about a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco close to my home there, and then found information about a Tamil movie. First try each time. You made a prediction that was totally and completely wrong based on a single data point. The prediction was poor quality, proven by the fact that I can do this. I don't want my HN cluttered with low quality predictions based on low quality data. So I voted you down.
jdietrich 10y ago
Voice recognition is a national joke in Scotland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbDnxzrbxn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbDnxzrbxn4

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).

lightedman 10y ago
"That requires finding the remote first." My TV is so old the remote is still wired to it. Finding the remote is never an issue.

morganvachon 10y ago

> "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." Indeed, and "perfect accent" varies from device to device. My wife and I are both from the Atlanta, Georgia area, yet we have distinctive accents; hers is much more "Southern" than mine as I grew up in several different states across the Southeast and Southwest, whereas she lived in the same house from birth to college, then moved back after graduating. We've found that her Nexus 6 understands me better than her even though she talks to it far more often than I do, and the reverse is true for our Shield TV despite it using the same backend as the phone. She has to try two or three times to get her phone to understand a command, where I can get it right the first time. On the Shield, I will tell YouTube to look for "funny cat videos" and I get "funny hat videos" every damn time, while she gets cats.

arjie 10y ago

Dude, I can ask my phone to show me information about Vishwaroopam and then navigate to Bermondsey station and then search for Taqueria Guadalajara right after. I literally just did it. At some point you're going to have to face a fact: you're an irrelevant minority. That doesn't mean that the tool only supports a narrow use case. In my case, I found a way to my Tube station in London, information about a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco close to my home there, and then found information about a Tamil movie. First try each time. You made a prediction that was totally and completely wrong based on a single data point. The prediction was poor quality, proven by the fact that I can do this. I don't want my HN cluttered with low quality predictions based on low quality data. So I voted you down.

jdietrich 10y ago

Voice recognition is a national joke in Scotland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbDnxzrbxn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbDnxzrbxn4