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I still have zero desire to speak to any computer with my voice. Not saying it's a bad product feature. Probably just a psychological profile some of us fall in
by frou_dh 5y ago
I still have zero desire to speak to any computer with my voice. Not saying it's a bad product feature. Probably just a psychological profile some of us fall into.
EDIT: Yes I'm already aware it can be useful/quick for doing X :)
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoI find it works well for a few use cases: - play some song or playlist - open all the blinds, or a set of blinds, or all lights, or some lights. And close then close them/turn them off. That’s about it. The only reason it works well for those use cases is because the equivalent menu/physical controls take too much time to use vs voice commands.
- fedreserved 5y agoI felt the same way until I started experiencing carpel tunnel typing with both thumbs
- yakubin 5y agoSame here. I'm curious if it has any correlation to having an internal voice. Do you have an internal voice for your thoughts?
- mrweasel 5y agoWait, don't all people have that? If not, then how do they think?
- Clampower 5y agoI don’t have an internal voice. I mostly think in concepts or shapes.
- ryan93 5y agoI genuinely dont believe people who say this. You cant think in shapes when thinking about your personal relationships.
- yakubin 5y ago(Not the commenter you replied to.) That's correct. But neither can you think in sentences in that case, unless your relationships are just calculated means to an end. Whether you want to continue a relationship is not a conclusion of a sentence, but something you know without words, just like you know without words whether you want to eat the dish that's on your plate.
- yakubin 5y agoI don't. I know a friend who doesn't as well. Both of us mainly think through an awareness of some kind of graph structure (non-visual). But what's more interesting is that through talking with others we've discovered one interesting thing about what it's like for other people to hear a voice in their heads: In most people's dreams, when someone talks, they can hear the voice, which has a specific pitch, rasp, etc. For me and my friend, in our dreams we can never characterize the voice. We just become aware of the sentence spoken and the time passed (even though in a way it feels immediate), but if we focus, it's clear that we cannot recall any sensation of hearing a voice in any way. It blew our minds off when we realized that other people's dreams are different in such a way. I can think of sentences. But they are not spoken in my head. There is no voice, which would be male or female etc. And I only do that when the sentences are the goal. They are not the means.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fredley 5y agoI got a free Google Home puck with some purchase a while ago. The only thing I've used it for is setting timers in the kitchen, which it's quite well suited for as it's genuinely useful to be able to do this hands-free, and to have multiple timers going at once. None of the other things it can do are of interest.
- pessimizer 5y agoFrom what I've heard about these products since their introduction, setting alarms is the one thing that they're unambiguously useful for. edit: For that they don't need to be networked, of course.
- NumberCruncher 5y agoThey are also handy at dimming/turning lights on/off or starting Spotify playlists while in the shower. Nothing essential TBH. [Edit] Google Home seems to be pretty good at separating your voice from background noises, like shower/TV.
- salamandersauce 5y agoWorks well for playing radio stations too. I also use my Echo to control my FireTV. Nice to be able to pause and grab something without hunting for the remote.
- sneak 5y agoThe speech recognition is performed in the cloud, not locally, so under the current architecture they do indeed need to upload the audio capture following the wakeword. One of the other things I used them for frequently before disabling it on all my devices and removing all of the networked mics from my house was things like "remind me to $THING at 21 tonight".
- themarkn 5y agoFwiw, starting in iOS 15, Siri will process speech on-device, which is huge.
- mrweasel 5y agoIt feels like unnecessarily complicated way to give instructions to you phone or computer. It's not that I can't see it being useful in some cases, but more often than not, it gets in the way, if it's not something you use regularly. I just want to be able to turn off Siri permanently. Just remove all possibilities of me triggering Siri. Why Siri is included on the Mac at all is something I don't understand.
- laurent92 5y agoIt complements the UI by summarizing properly: “Will it rain tonight?” and “Set an alarm for 6am” are the only two usecases I’ve been satisfied with, but they work much better than the UI. I’m not sure it’s worth the development time. But it’s like: Let’s create a UI with all info we think the user wants, and everything else will be done by Siri.
- loloquwowndueo 5y agoBut we asked Siri if it was going to rain, it said unequivocally no, we didn’t take umbrellas or raincoats and it rained. We got soaked :(
- wutbrodo 5y agoThis isn't inherent to voice assistants though (which is what this subthread is about). Siri is a known, particularly poor implementation of a voice assistant. I don't have an Alexa, but I just moved to a city where rainy days come out of nowhere. My Google Home is concise and precise about the chance that I'll need an umbrella, including what time the chance of rain starts.
- e_proxus 5y agoI don’t know if it’s related but the weather app on iOS frequently takes minutes to update the weather for my location even when looking directly at the app. It’s incredibly annoying and has led me to believe the weather was going to be completely different more than once.
- 5y ago
- dgellow 5y agoMe neither, but speaking to my watch when I’m on my bike, waiting at a traffic light, works very well! I’ve never seen a use for Siri on my phone or laptop but use it often when biking around to set reminders or timers without losing focus over my environment.
- mFixman 5y agoSiri and similar voice assistants work really well as an universal remote control. Right now I can ask Alexa to open or close the curtains, to start cleaning my house, or to play some music or podcast — all without having to find where my cellphone is or risking getting trapped a couple of hours on the internet.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ravenstine 5y agoI'm the same, but mostly in the following senses: - My fingers will more reliably get me to where I want to go in a reasonable amount of time. - I don't desire for The Google to know the instant I turn my lights on or possibly take a dump. - It's only a matter of time before "always on" turns into "always listening".
- chakkepolja 5y agoI just think I want a voice based CLI more than some NLP assistant for specific situations.