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> Because after 5 years, Alexa still doesn't work well enough for most people except to set a kitchen timer, play music, or check the outdoor temperature. Same
by shantly 7y ago
> Because after 5 years, Alexa still doesn't work well enough for most people except to set a kitchen timer, play music, or check the outdoor temperature.
Same with the others. Google's seems to be the best, but it's still not great. Given where we were with custom-trained (to your own voice) locally-processed speech-to-text almost 20 friggin' years ago, it's hard to imagine that wouldn't be at least as good as the spying cloud AI mumbo-jumbo by now, had those being available and "free" not taken all the money, interest, and talent away from that.
- dawg- 7y agoI got a free Google home mini last year for buying some other thing...I was blown away by how truly bad it is compared to what the marketing leads people to believe. It's honestly useless for most of the tasks they advertise it being able to do. Most of the calendar functions only work 50% of the time. It can set timers pretty consistently. Sometimes I can get it to change the thermostat. It usually plays the music I ask for. More often than not it takes 2-3 different tries before I can word my request in a way that it will understand. Honestly if I had paid for it I would have probably wanted my money back. Maybe that's why they are giving them out for free.
- shantly 7y agoYeah, kitchen timers & alarms are about the only thing Siri gets right often enough that it's not less work, on average, to just go do what you need to do with tappy-tappies instead.
- ghaff 7y agoThe fundamental problem is that, while the voice recognition isn't bad, the assistants are all pretty much incapable of performing any sort of complex task or even not so complex tasks for which you haven't memorized a fairly precise incantation. The very worst admin I've ever had is still about 1000x more capable than one of these voice assistants.