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Google's voice recognition is excellent. I trust Assistant to help me throughout my day with a number of things now: - Cooking & laundry timers - Reminders (
by veesahni 9y ago
Google's voice recognition is excellent. I trust Assistant to help me throughout my day with a number of things now:
- Cooking & laundry timers
- Reminders (remind me to do X when I get home)
- Directions (Take me to the nearest X, take me home, etc)
- Checking hours of business (what time does X close today)
- Initiating phone calls (Call X)
- Checking weather (is it going to snow today? How cold is it right now?)
- Conversions (what's X ounces to ml)
- Quick stock checks (what's X stock price)
- Playing music around the house (play X on the kitchen speakers)
Additionally, I've found myself using Android's voice recording capabilities to dictate text all the time. It's just so much faster than typing or swiping.
I haven't an iPhone for a few years, so I can't compare with what Siri is capable of today.
- spullara 9y agoAll of those Siri can do. Anything else?
- ztratar 9y agoSiri misunderstands me so frequently, I've learned to not use it for most of the above things.
- veesahni 9y agoThis is what I experienced years ago when I last had an iPhone. Google's voice recognition is exceptional. I can mumble words and it still seems to contextually figure out what I was probably trying to say.
- swish_bob 9y agoUnless you're picking from a list of options, at which point Google becomes utterly useless to me. I've literally spent 10 minutes in a "SMS, WhatsApp or Hangout" "SMS" "SMS, WhatsApp or Hangout" loop before, trying every inflection I could think of.
- veesahni 9y agoHow about continuity of communication between Google Home & Phone. In my kitchen, I can ask Google Home "how far is X" .. and it responds with a distance/time and pops up a notification on my phone to initiate Google Maps navigation to the target. Useful if I'm in getting ready to go there. Does Apple's HomePod have any such continuity with an iPhone?
- hellofunk 9y agoThis is strictly anecdotal but a friend of mine is an exec at Facebook and we were recently discussing phones. He had an iPhone for a few years and has now had an Android for a couple years. He said that by far the most drastic difference between the two platforms is Siri vs. Assistant (or whatever Google's assistant is called in the phone). He said it is no contest how much more useful and functional Assistant is, compared to Siri. We did not dwell on this discussion and I otherwise find him an objective, un-biased user of the two platforms, so there you have it.
- 1337biz 9y agoObligatory question is why? What usefullness or functionality made that much of a difference to him?
- hellofunk 9y agoI want to like Siri but I spend so much time correcting what it has misunderstood, it's nearly not worth using it. The Google alternative is, from what I understand, something that just works.
- ddingus 9y agoBut it's not personified to the degree Siri is. I noted this elsewhere in the thread. Doing that bit of theatre, with some humor, pop culture relevant things, even just good responses, appears to matter more to people than "it can do it", and "it actually did it" hit rates. OK Google needs a name. Google is this big, smart thing. People get that. But, "Ask Siri" has less friction and appears easier to identify with than giving an order to a corporation is, "OK Google." Maybe just, "Hey Google" would make a subtle difference. And, in typical Apple fashion, "Ask Siri" is all you need to know to attempt it. Further, discovery has error. If that can be best guess, combined with some fun, people will play. "OK Google" lacks these human friendly connotations. A name would be a follow, hard for Google, but... If it were me, I would flat out own that, get the name, and run ADS. "We hear you... meet [name not common, familiar sounding, friendly, easy to say.]" There has to be either an old world name with good connotations, or a variant that is catchy, fun, gender fluid. Lol, use goog. Mostly kidding, but a tiny bit serious. Better, much better is out there. Or, let the user name it. Why not? "OK Google, can I call you inigo?" "Sure, I will answer to inigo. And OK Google when I'm not properly introduced, OK?"
- nl 9y agoIt's not that it can do it. It's how reliable it is when it does it. I use both iOS and Android, and Google Assistant is so much more reliable that I find I use it. With Siri I find I end up having to intervene so often it isn't worth it. I do have an Australian accent, so maybe that is a factor.
- melling 9y agoYeah, Siri doesn’t hear as well. It can’t pause music by me asking it. It also has some annoying bugs: http://h4labs.org/siri-next-monday-isnt-christmas/ http://h4labs.org/siri-next-monday-isnt-christmas/ Another one is when Siri tries to update an existing reminder when I say “create reminder” I have Apple Music and I’ll often use my little Echo Dot when I want to play a song just because I can simply talk to Alexa from across the room and it will hear me.
- Mister_Snuggles 9y agoI’ve started using Siri to control music when I drive. “Hey Siri” followed by “pause music”, “next track”, “go back”, “play music” all work as expected.
- kahnjw 9y agoAll of those Siri can do maybe half the time. In my experience, it's a completely unreliable service. Sort of embarrassing when your voice assistant can't perform the most basic possible task on an iPhone: locking the screen.
- dv_dt 9y agoI keep hoping Siri will work on something like "How long is <Store/Restaurant> in <City> open?". I don't know if Google or Amazon succeed here either.
- killion 9y agoI ask Siri for the closing time of different stores all the time. "Hey Siri, when does X close?" works for me. On Siri most things don't work for me but that does.
- jacksmith21006 9y agoYes Siri can after 5 tries and figure out the wording. Go try the Google assistant and get back to us that Siri is equal.
- theDoug 9y agoSiri can't do two countdown timers at once, such as what I need when cooking. It's bonkers to me that this is still a limitation on a phone that lets me track a dozen-plus world clocks, as though it's a more common use case.
- petee 9y agocan do, not will do. I've yet to meet anyone who got siri to do anything, let alone useful, on the 5th try. I can mumble microcontroller part numbers to google, or other odd non-standard words/phrases and 90% of the time its correct on the first try; half the time i'm astonished that it even was able to figure out what i said
- ams6110 9y agoAndroid's voice typing has been weird for me. It used to work pretty well offline, then a few months ago all the punctuation stopped working. Now it's working again and the overall recognition is better than ever.
- londons_explore 9y agosame here. Last year punctuation didn't work for a few weeks.
- jsmith99 9y ago> - Reminders (remind me to do X when I get home) One thing it can't do is 'remind me to do X when I leave work'. Can siri?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- glhaynes 9y agoYes. "Hey Siri, remind me to bring a change of clothes when I leave home." just now created an appropriate item in Reminders.
- jbg_ 9y agowhich will, of course, trigger the reminder as you walk down the street away from home, forcing you to go back and get the change of clothes that you forgot.
- scarface74 9y agoYes and it can also remind you to do something when you "get in the car" or "get out of the car", if you have it paired to your Bluetooth in your car.
- dmd 9y agoBut what none of them can do is what people actually need, which is "remind me to do X before I leave work".
- scarface74 9y agoWhat signal could it pick up on before you leave work besides when you get in your car or after you leave somewhere?
- jannyfer 9y agoSudden increase of movement (via the accelerometer) around the time they usually leave work, for example. If I usually leave work around 5-6 and I start packing up my bag, that could be a signal.
- brownbat 9y agoI use it for these things, they're ok. I occasionally try to get it to control an app, it usually fails, but that's my dream state: I'd like to be able to say, "Hey Google, open app X and do Y task." But I don't know if there's enough incentive for apps to add an assistant interface. How easy is it to add commands on your app that it will accept via assistant? Are there common APIs or structures for this to shift the incentives, allow it to proliferate app by app, rather than waiting on the assistant developers to manually do each one? After that we need to go back to Aza Raskin's project, uh, Ubiquity? Anyone could build little scripts, verbs, that helped build a natural language input from the ground up. That's how we get to stuff like, "Hey Google, take a screenshot of news.ycombinator.com and email it to Joe."
- konschubert 9y ago> Are there common APIs or structures for this to shift the incentives, allow it to proliferate app by app, rather than waiting on the assistant developers to manually do each one? I think once somebody finds a good API for that, it will be a watershed moment. Amazon Alexa has apps called "skills", but they expose their own voice interface which is always inconsistent.
- davedx 9y agoI always thought that Android's intents could be a good API for voice commands. It actually surprised me that we never really got much deep app integration with voice on Android phones given that API.
- gandutraveler 9y agoI can open app and ask for actions on Google assistant on my Pixel phone. I use things like - "Play <song> on Spotify" - "Send message <message> to <someone> on WhatsApp" - "Take a selfie or screenshot" Maybe app actions are only available on Pixel devices.
- piyush_soni 9y agoNo, they are available on all devices (at least on my Nexus 6P too). It's only a matter of which apps are implementing the "Actions on Google Assistant" and for which operations.
- Pokepokalypse 9y agoGoogle's voice recognition is excellent, and fuck Samsung for putting that stupid Bixby crap and getting in the way.
- happertiger 9y agoSigh. That’s the main reason I won’t move to the s9. I already have an iPhone and Siri just sucks. Why would I want another sucky assistant? It’s like hiring the wrong person... twice. I really wish the manufacturers would only have a few features, like weather or timer or location (home, work, school) that were truly bulletproof in execution. It feels like they are trying to do too much most of the time when I just want them to not suck consistently so I can actually use them reliably.
- softawre 9y agoGet a Pixel2. It feels like an iPhone did 5-6 years ago.
- Angostura 9y agoI use Siri a fair amount from the Phone (mainly in the car or kitchen to be honest). Going through those: - Cooking & laundry timers - Yes. Works well - Reminders (remind me to do X when I get home) - I find Apple geofenced alerts to be unreliable. - Directions (Take me to the nearest X, take me home, etc) - Pretty good, search isn't as good as Google, but good enough these days. - Checking hours of business (what time does X close today) - Never tried, doubt it would work. - Initiating phone calls (Call X) - Yes - Works well - Checking weather (is it going to snow today? How cold is it right now?) - Yes, works well - Conversions (what's X ounces to ml) - Never tried. Just tried now - works OK - Quick stock checks (what's X stock price) - As above works OK, says whether there has been a fall or rise. - Playing music around the house (play X on the kitchen speakers)- works very well.
- Woofles 9y agoChecking hours of the business works well. The integration with Yelp has that done pretty well. I've actually been super impressed with Siri. You can have it call you an uber, get the leading scorer from your favorite hockey team, contextually ask followup questions about a person you were searching, etc. I haven't used Siri in a long time (besides timers, weather, etc) and it has come so far since I did.
- Angostura 9y agoSounds like I need go get a favourite hockey team lickety-spit.
- enos_feedler 9y agoits the Toronto Maple Leafs