6 ms·

This is my experience with any 'smart assistant' product that is or ever has been. It's always frustrating but never particularly hard to find the special inca

This is my experience with any 'smart assistant' product that is or ever has been. It's always frustrating but never particularly hard to find the special incantation that will invoke it to do the thing that you want it to. Overall though it's simply not worth the effort which is probably why I end up using these overwhelmingly complex devices only for their most mundane functions like timers and getting the weather. Trying for anything moderately complex, and I might as well be asking the dog to do it for me.

renewiltord 6y ago
That's the worst thing. It used to work well for me.
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  All technology is becoming more and more this way for me.
- isaacimagine 6y ago
  Same. It's been getting less smart over time.
  - deaddodo 6y ago
    This is the same way I feel about Google Maps. Especially with the new streamlined/cards UI. Everything is objectively worse and I can't even force it to act like it used to. Actual, useful functionality has just been lopped off.
    - erikerikson 6y ago
      And Google Search.
- Causality1 6y ago
  Yep. Google has been getting progressively worse at recognizing my words over the past two years. It's also started randomly capitalizing words that aren't proper nouns and seemingly has a blacklist of words that it clearly recognizes as speech but refuses to type such as "o'clock".
  - iforgotpassword 6y ago
    "Take a look boss, I made the AI better yet again! After the last change, telemetry shows our users are talking even longer to the assistant each time they use it. Engagement is up, they seem to love interacting with it."
    - Causality1 6y ago
      And whoever decided that the Google Assistant "clang!" sound needed to be the loudest, most piercing sound physically possible to generate with a smartphone deserves to be drawn and quartered.
- herodoturtle 6y ago
  My dad and I hacked ours apart and now have some interesting chess games going.
hadlock 6y ago
My issue is that I found out the special incantations two years ago, and then they changed (I presume) something about the core language processing logic, and now none of that works. For example I have Philips Hue lights behind the TV/Screen on my living room wall, and I use their "color loop" behind the screen when watching movies etc. The problem is that "TV", "Television" and "Screen" are semi-protected words, so "turn off tv lights" ends up with the TV being turned off 9/10 times. "We" compromised and those lights are now called "screen wall" lights As for setting certain lights to "the color loop", what used to be a 90% success rate (the other 10% turning my lights to "the color blue/bloo(p)") will now set the lights of the room I'm currently in to the color loop, which is usually the living room, not the screen wall. Also as recently as this summer I used to be able to set the whole house to "the color loop" this feature recently disappeared. The color loop slowly and nearly imperceptibly fades the colors from red to green to blue etc over several minutes. It's technically part of "hue labs" but it's a "beta feature" that's been available in the product now for over three years so I would argue it is core functionality at this point.
- apendleton 6y ago
  Yeah, my experience is related, in that it seems to think "lamp" and "lights" are synonyms, so I have a lamp in my living room, but "turn off the living room lamp" turns off all the lights in the living room, not just the light called "living room lamp." It's like, at this intermediate level of intelligence that's particularly annoying: too smart to just literally use the names I assigned, but not smart enough to actually intelligently apply synonyms or fuzzy matching. Worst of all possible worlds.
  - dotancohen 6y ago
    > Worst of all possible worlds. At least there are no tribbles.
  - jen729w 6y ago
    Siri (HomePod) was getting confused with my “turn everything off” incantation, so I’ve changed the name of the ‘scene’ and now when we leave the house we instruct her to “PUT THAT COFFEE DOWN”. Because coffee is for closers.
leetcrew 6y ago
> It's always frustrating but never particularly hard to find the special incantation that will invoke it to do the thing that you want it to. not always. I used to use google play music to play music from my own library in the car. any time I asked it to play a moderately obscure artist, it would interpret that as whatever popular artist had a similar name. it would then play the radio station for that artist, since I didn't have the premium subscription. I found some success with spelling out the artist name letter by letter, but even that consistently failed for certain names. also sometimes I would say "list albums by X" to help me remember the name of what I wanted. no matter what I tried, it would only list three albums "and others". who could want this behavior? if I ask you to list albums, yes I actually want to hear every single album name! I'm now paying for YT music (since the free version apparently does not support android auto), and it so far it works flawlessly. infuriating.
mlang23 6y ago
Same here. I really wonder how these products sell. The most basic things dont work. And if they are confused, then for real. For about 2 years, when Siri happened to misunderstand the command "Call ..." it would answer "OK, calling you" and actually try to call my own number. This is so weird that it actually feels like someone wrote that piece of code to prank the user. If these things would actually work, I'd definitely use one regularily. However, whenever I visit an Alexa owner, I realize after a few interactions that I really couldn't be bothered with this stuff. I think the "taxi" problem is still around with Siri. Put any taxi organisation into your phonebook, and include "taxi" in the name. You will likely not be able to call it with siri, since it insists to search for taxis in your area. Its always the same bug. These things have absolutely no idea about the context. And some hand-crafted rules go haywire after a while, because apparently nobody reviews them. When I got my first iPhone (iOS 5) I put in my date of birth during configuration, and promptly noticed that the german speech synthesizers says Nineteenseventynine when I enter 1979. All aother 4-digit numbers are fine, only 1979 is pronounced english. So apparently someone put this exception in there for a completely bogus reason, and it stayed there. It is still there today, after 8 years.
- jen729w 6y ago
  > I really wonder how these products sell. Because they’re currently better than nothing. My HomePod works 90% of the time. I can create specific scenes for the things she can’t quite figure out. Being able to walk in to the kitchen and tell her to put the radio or the light or a specific album or a timer on is actually really amazing. Most of the time. Certainly amazing enough to suffer the times she doesn’t want to co-operate, because then I just do that myself which I would have done anyway. It helps that the HomePod is also a great speaker in its own right, and that it’s one single cylinder with one cord. It’s a very tidy device.
  - mlang23 6y ago
    Well, I have a Sonos One SL, so I know why you like the HomePod form factor. but I explicitly got the SL version because I really dont see any use for a voice assistant. I think the success rate of playing specific artists or tracks might be related to how mainstream your choice of music is. In my experience, the success rate is very bad, actually beyond useable. The only use case I see which has an acceptable failure rate is asking for the time and setting a timer. And even asking for the time fails about 1/10 times with the Alexa system my gf has in her flat... And if asking for the time is the only thing which works decently, well, that is really telling about the state of the art...
lerchmo 6y ago
My toddler wants to hear a song 1000x, I can't do something like "Play 5 little monkeys jumping on the bed on repeat or in a loop or 10x" I have to tell it each time.
- pftburger 6y ago
  this is a feature, not a bug. "Hey google, play five little monkeys ten thousand times on max volume and disable input"
- mkl 6y ago
  Could you just make a 10x looped version with Audacity? Or can it only play from its own library?
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    yeah but what happens when they want to listen to surfin bird on repeat the next day and banana phone on repeat the day after that? awfully clunky workflow.
- isochronous 6y ago
  Once you start playing the song once, you can generally say "repeat on" and it'll loop the song. YMMV depending on where the song is coming from.
  - gorkish 6y ago
    Adding this to my book of spells
snaily 6y ago
A UI with next to zero discoverability and an incredibly broad input set ("all speech") must really work for most conceivable inputs, or only die-hard enthusiasts will keep trying.
- igravious 6y ago
  Yeah, why can't I `man Alexa` to get its speech UI syntax the way I can `man bash` to get its command line UI syntax? Why not? Why not?!
oblio 6y ago
I think we need something extremely close to AGI for natural interfaces to work. Similar story for self-driving cars: car driving helpers/assistants (lane keeping, etc.) are ok, self-driving cars will be a huge disaster until we are really close to AGI. These are the things where getting 80-90% there isn't enough. We're smarter than chimps or other animals because we can cover the long tail of events.
jeffrallen 6y ago
Your dog would like you to know that he is most certainly NOT as stupid as a computer.
goopthink 6y ago
> It's always frustrating but never particularly hard to find the special incantation that will invoke it to do the thing that you want it to. I think magical incantations is a perfect way to think about it. Using voice assistants feels more like the land of Harry Potter than the land of technology we live in. It's the flipside of “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
PurpleFoxy 6y ago
I don’t even bother using them for timers anymore since it’s usually easier to do it on my watch. Voice assistants are limited to navigation requests while driving for me
markdog12 6y ago
It's all just a big charade from these companies, as if they ever work. Billions of dollars made from devices that don't even work, but people buy them because they've been lead to believe they work. They're worse than useless, because they give you hope that they actually do what the companies say they do. What a sham. Maybe in another 10-20 years.
munificent 6y ago
It's like someone took the maddening random guesswork user experience of mid-80s text adventures, mixed in mediocre speech-to-text and decided to base an entire product category around it. I absolutely do not get it.

renewiltord 6y ago

That's the worst thing. It used to work well for me.

EvanAnderson 6y ago
All technology is becoming more and more this way for me.
isaacimagine 6y ago
Same. It's been getting less smart over time.
- deaddodo 6y ago
  This is the same way I feel about Google Maps. Especially with the new streamlined/cards UI. Everything is objectively worse and I can't even force it to act like it used to. Actual, useful functionality has just been lopped off.
  - erikerikson 6y ago
    And Google Search.
Causality1 6y ago
Yep. Google has been getting progressively worse at recognizing my words over the past two years. It's also started randomly capitalizing words that aren't proper nouns and seemingly has a blacklist of words that it clearly recognizes as speech but refuses to type such as "o'clock".
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  "Take a look boss, I made the AI better yet again! After the last change, telemetry shows our users are talking even longer to the assistant each time they use it. Engagement is up, they seem to love interacting with it."
  - Causality1 6y ago
    And whoever decided that the Google Assistant "clang!" sound needed to be the loudest, most piercing sound physically possible to generate with a smartphone deserves to be drawn and quartered.
herodoturtle 6y ago
My dad and I hacked ours apart and now have some interesting chess games going.

hadlock 6y ago

My issue is that I found out the special incantations two years ago, and then they changed (I presume) something about the core language processing logic, and now none of that works. For example I have Philips Hue lights behind the TV/Screen on my living room wall, and I use their "color loop" behind the screen when watching movies etc. The problem is that "TV", "Television" and "Screen" are semi-protected words, so "turn off tv lights" ends up with the TV being turned off 9/10 times. "We" compromised and those lights are now called "screen wall" lights As for setting certain lights to "the color loop", what used to be a 90% success rate (the other 10% turning my lights to "the color blue/bloo(p)") will now set the lights of the room I'm currently in to the color loop, which is usually the living room, not the screen wall. Also as recently as this summer I used to be able to set the whole house to "the color loop" this feature recently disappeared. The color loop slowly and nearly imperceptibly fades the colors from red to green to blue etc over several minutes. It's technically part of "hue labs" but it's a "beta feature" that's been available in the product now for over three years so I would argue it is core functionality at this point.

apendleton 6y ago
Yeah, my experience is related, in that it seems to think "lamp" and "lights" are synonyms, so I have a lamp in my living room, but "turn off the living room lamp" turns off all the lights in the living room, not just the light called "living room lamp." It's like, at this intermediate level of intelligence that's particularly annoying: too smart to just literally use the names I assigned, but not smart enough to actually intelligently apply synonyms or fuzzy matching. Worst of all possible worlds.
- dotancohen 6y ago
  > Worst of all possible worlds. At least there are no tribbles.
- jen729w 6y ago
  Siri (HomePod) was getting confused with my “turn everything off” incantation, so I’ve changed the name of the ‘scene’ and now when we leave the house we instruct her to “PUT THAT COFFEE DOWN”. Because coffee is for closers.

leetcrew 6y ago

> It's always frustrating but never particularly hard to find the special incantation that will invoke it to do the thing that you want it to. not always. I used to use google play music to play music from my own library in the car. any time I asked it to play a moderately obscure artist, it would interpret that as whatever popular artist had a similar name. it would then play the radio station for that artist, since I didn't have the premium subscription. I found some success with spelling out the artist name letter by letter, but even that consistently failed for certain names. also sometimes I would say "list albums by X" to help me remember the name of what I wanted. no matter what I tried, it would only list three albums "and others". who could want this behavior? if I ask you to list albums, yes I actually want to hear every single album name! I'm now paying for YT music (since the free version apparently does not support android auto), and it so far it works flawlessly. infuriating.

mlang23 6y ago

Same here. I really wonder how these products sell. The most basic things dont work. And if they are confused, then for real. For about 2 years, when Siri happened to misunderstand the command "Call ..." it would answer "OK, calling you" and actually try to call my own number. This is so weird that it actually feels like someone wrote that piece of code to prank the user. If these things would actually work, I'd definitely use one regularily. However, whenever I visit an Alexa owner, I realize after a few interactions that I really couldn't be bothered with this stuff. I think the "taxi" problem is still around with Siri. Put any taxi organisation into your phonebook, and include "taxi" in the name. You will likely not be able to call it with siri, since it insists to search for taxis in your area. Its always the same bug. These things have absolutely no idea about the context. And some hand-crafted rules go haywire after a while, because apparently nobody reviews them. When I got my first iPhone (iOS 5) I put in my date of birth during configuration, and promptly noticed that the german speech synthesizers says Nineteenseventynine when I enter 1979. All aother 4-digit numbers are fine, only 1979 is pronounced english. So apparently someone put this exception in there for a completely bogus reason, and it stayed there. It is still there today, after 8 years.

jen729w 6y ago
> I really wonder how these products sell. Because they’re currently better than nothing. My HomePod works 90% of the time. I can create specific scenes for the things she can’t quite figure out. Being able to walk in to the kitchen and tell her to put the radio or the light or a specific album or a timer on is actually really amazing. Most of the time. Certainly amazing enough to suffer the times she doesn’t want to co-operate, because then I just do that myself which I would have done anyway. It helps that the HomePod is also a great speaker in its own right, and that it’s one single cylinder with one cord. It’s a very tidy device.
- mlang23 6y ago
  Well, I have a Sonos One SL, so I know why you like the HomePod form factor. but I explicitly got the SL version because I really dont see any use for a voice assistant. I think the success rate of playing specific artists or tracks might be related to how mainstream your choice of music is. In my experience, the success rate is very bad, actually beyond useable. The only use case I see which has an acceptable failure rate is asking for the time and setting a timer. And even asking for the time fails about 1/10 times with the Alexa system my gf has in her flat... And if asking for the time is the only thing which works decently, well, that is really telling about the state of the art...

lerchmo 6y ago

My toddler wants to hear a song 1000x, I can't do something like "Play 5 little monkeys jumping on the bed on repeat or in a loop or 10x" I have to tell it each time.

pftburger 6y ago
this is a feature, not a bug. "Hey google, play five little monkeys ten thousand times on max volume and disable input"
mkl 6y ago
Could you just make a 10x looped version with Audacity? Or can it only play from its own library?
- leetcrew 6y ago
  yeah but what happens when they want to listen to surfin bird on repeat the next day and banana phone on repeat the day after that? awfully clunky workflow.
isochronous 6y ago
Once you start playing the song once, you can generally say "repeat on" and it'll loop the song. YMMV depending on where the song is coming from.
- gorkish 6y ago
  Adding this to my book of spells

snaily 6y ago

A UI with next to zero discoverability and an incredibly broad input set ("all speech") must really work for most conceivable inputs, or only die-hard enthusiasts will keep trying.

igravious 6y ago
Yeah, why can't I `man Alexa` to get its speech UI syntax the way I can `man bash` to get its command line UI syntax? Why not? Why not?!

oblio 6y ago

I think we need something extremely close to AGI for natural interfaces to work. Similar story for self-driving cars: car driving helpers/assistants (lane keeping, etc.) are ok, self-driving cars will be a huge disaster until we are really close to AGI. These are the things where getting 80-90% there isn't enough. We're smarter than chimps or other animals because we can cover the long tail of events.

jeffrallen 6y ago

Your dog would like you to know that he is most certainly NOT as stupid as a computer.

goopthink 6y ago

> It's always frustrating but never particularly hard to find the special incantation that will invoke it to do the thing that you want it to. I think magical incantations is a perfect way to think about it. Using voice assistants feels more like the land of Harry Potter than the land of technology we live in. It's the flipside of “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

PurpleFoxy 6y ago

I don’t even bother using them for timers anymore since it’s usually easier to do it on my watch. Voice assistants are limited to navigation requests while driving for me

markdog12 6y ago

It's all just a big charade from these companies, as if they ever work. Billions of dollars made from devices that don't even work, but people buy them because they've been lead to believe they work. They're worse than useless, because they give you hope that they actually do what the companies say they do. What a sham. Maybe in another 10-20 years.

munificent 6y ago

It's like someone took the maddening random guesswork user experience of mid-80s text adventures, mixed in mediocre speech-to-text and decided to base an entire product category around it. I absolutely do not get it.