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Edit: forgive my enthusiasm. Voice assistants seen as command-lines make me excited. No it's not! The issue is that we as developers can't actually innovate on

Edit: forgive my enthusiasm. Voice assistants seen as command-lines make me excited. No it's not! The issue is that we as developers can't actually innovate on it. Look at what Apple did in its heyday with the App Store. Now it's commonplace, back then it was mindblowingly innovative unicorn goodness (I'm a bit biased :) ). And I understand, you can critique the App Store for many things, but the iPhone would be worse without it. And they didn't create an "App Store" or any other free extensible model for Siri. They should have, because people are on aggregate more creative than any big company including Apple -- thanks to survivorship bias. What Siri is actually quite good at is interpreting single words or small sentences. So it would be a perfect spoken command-line interface. I have had genuine situations where I needed to talk and couldn't type, but apps aren't allowed to make use of Siri, so I can't talk to apps, I need to type. Siri and other voice assistants are amazing when you look at it as we look at a command-line.

mlang23 5y ago
Well, looking at the skills offers by alexa, I am not sure if a siri appstore would be worthwhile. 99.9% of alexa skills are totally and utterly useless.
veidr 5y ago
Interesting take. I am kinda excited about voice assistants and the command-line style use cases for them, too, except the closed nature of Siri and the dominance of Apple has probably set them back 10 or 20 years. Yes, if Siri was open and any iOS app could easily make a "voice CLI" to their apps that would awesome. But, that's not the case at all. I am a heavy user of Siri, too, with an Apple Watch and a HomePod in every room of my house. It's better than nothing. But it is still objectively terrible. It can barely do more than set timers, send text messages, and control the lights and music. That's not useless, but it's not even close to what I wish I could do with my voice (which is basically what you describe).
- wwtrv 5y ago
  You can do it using https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech or is it actually missing anything necessary for a “voice cli” app?
  - veidr 5y ago
    I haven't actually looked at in depth for a few OS releases (I was excited to make a voice CLI I could use with my watch, since I commuted by bike). I think they may have made some prgress since then, but I don't think the Speech.framework you linked to provides what we are talking about when we say a "CLI for voice". I think that API is only useful when you've already opened the app and it is able to record live audio (or process previously recorded audio). So you can't just be like, running from the feds and shout to your watch or phone, "Hey Siri, destroy evidence, password 'Rosebud'!" and have your arson app torch your meth lab.
    - mettamage 5y ago
      Hahaha! Nice one :D And here I am thinking about mundane applications such as: "Hey Siri, limit order 10 shares of ACME for $44.95" or "Hey Siri, call John Doe via WhatsApp" or "Hey Siri, invite John Doe and Jane Goodall to bowling on this Sunday 7PM via someSpecialCalendarAppThatIsNotTheStockCalendarApp"
      - groby_b 5y ago
        "Thank you, I've ordered 10 shares of AYME for $4495" The fundamental problem with voice assistants is an utter lack of common sense. Any human assistant not completely asleep at the wheel would flag the above because it's outside your normal patterns and ask for clarification. Voice assistants will just go ahead and do it. And then play a Siberian Metal Polka song because they thought they heard that too.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
jon-wood 5y ago
> And they didn't create an "App Store" or any other free extensible model for Siri. They should have, because people are on aggregate more creative than any big company including Apple -- thanks to survivorship bias. They did, its just not well advertised. Any app on iOS can expose actions to Siri, for example the BBC Sounds app exposes actions to start playing a specific radio station. Those actions are then available from Siri on your phone, and any HomePods that have been granted access to execute actions on your phone. On your point of looking at it like a command line, those same actions are also exposed to Shortcuts, allowing you to compose them in arbitrary pipelines. The output of one action can be passed into the output of another or even stuffed into a variable for later use. I've developed for all three of the major voice assistants and Siri is by far the best simply because it completely throws out the window the concept of developing a "voice application", voice is just one possible entry point into an iOS app.
redacted 5y ago
Ironically enough given its reputation, but this is what Bixby is great at - controlling the _device_ with your voice using short commands - "Open Camera", "Take photo", "Delete last photo" etc all work as expected (as a toy example, far more complicated stuff is possible even before including their Siri Shortcut equivalent)
Anonymous4272 5y ago
Can you not use voice typing with swiftkey (or any other keyboard) and open termux? I've done that a few times on android
pessimizer 5y ago
I've loved the idea of a verbal commandline, too, especially since watching the Play For Tomorrow episode "Shades[*]." It's a teen brave new worldish sort of thing, but all of the characters are constantly interacting with databases, networks and media (including VR) with this very stylized language, not how you would talk to a person. That's the problem, really. You have to use a stylized language on a commandline. A GUI is really just giving you a graphical diagram and guide to a really stylized language (if you reduce a GUI to its clickable/typeable areas.) It's very hard to draw an arrow pointing at a picture representing a particular predicate in the very restricted bandwidth of serialized sound. The reason why "Shades" was so interesting to me was that its future teens clearly all knew the stylized language well, and obviously would have learned it in school. To have that kind of universal training in a certain form of computer interaction would require a universal OS, like what UNIX quickly became. So maybe this is a conclusion coming off the above at an odd angle, but what I'm actually saying is that commandlines are hard and people don't like them. Visual, and even tactile stuff have the ability to offer so much feedback and so many affordances for amateur operators in comparison to audio that audio can't compete. Audio feedback is all exposition and nothing to hold onto or see. And just like film exposition, it often comes too slowly to keep people's attention, or too quickly for people to understand. It's always going to be easier to grab the knob and turn it, or to find the button and click it. The major advantage of audio interfaces is that they're cheap both materially (you don't need a screen or a control panel) and for the user (you don't have to stop walking, or sit down, or grab a thing, etc. you just speak.) For me these advantages are actually dominant over innate usability, which is why I also believe with you in the huge potential of audio interfaces as a platform. I just think that the only way to get there is to build a universal and open verbal protocol, with standardized interfaces for accessing databases, media, and networks. Something that children can (will) learn, and will have a lifetime of use. An opinionated and efficient design moonshot like the web (or the Bourne Shell or Gnu Corutils) turned out to be. A platform whose innovation comes from addition of new ways and not from subtraction of the old ones. A platform that holds onto backwards compatibility as long as is practical, thinking in terms of how many decades to keep things around, not how many releases, or possibly even a closed kernel that will never change built on top of some mathy orthogonal basis system. * I wish this hadn't been deleted from youtube.
- 5y ago
cpuguy83 5y ago
Siri sucks because it does t understand what you are saying at all, not because there aren't a million things hooked into it. To be fair, all the assistants are extremely bad at it, Siri just seems to be at the bottom of a bad list.

mlang23 5y ago

Well, looking at the skills offers by alexa, I am not sure if a siri appstore would be worthwhile. 99.9% of alexa skills are totally and utterly useless.

veidr 5y ago

Interesting take. I am kinda excited about voice assistants and the command-line style use cases for them, too, except the closed nature of Siri and the dominance of Apple has probably set them back 10 or 20 years. Yes, if Siri was open and any iOS app could easily make a "voice CLI" to their apps that would awesome. But, that's not the case at all. I am a heavy user of Siri, too, with an Apple Watch and a HomePod in every room of my house. It's better than nothing. But it is still objectively terrible. It can barely do more than set timers, send text messages, and control the lights and music. That's not useless, but it's not even close to what I wish I could do with my voice (which is basically what you describe).

wwtrv 5y ago
You can do it using https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech or is it actually missing anything necessary for a “voice cli” app?
- veidr 5y ago
  I haven't actually looked at in depth for a few OS releases (I was excited to make a voice CLI I could use with my watch, since I commuted by bike). I think they may have made some prgress since then, but I don't think the Speech.framework you linked to provides what we are talking about when we say a "CLI for voice". I think that API is only useful when you've already opened the app and it is able to record live audio (or process previously recorded audio). So you can't just be like, running from the feds and shout to your watch or phone, "Hey Siri, destroy evidence, password 'Rosebud'!" and have your arson app torch your meth lab.
  - mettamage 5y ago
    Hahaha! Nice one :D And here I am thinking about mundane applications such as: "Hey Siri, limit order 10 shares of ACME for $44.95" or "Hey Siri, call John Doe via WhatsApp" or "Hey Siri, invite John Doe and Jane Goodall to bowling on this Sunday 7PM via someSpecialCalendarAppThatIsNotTheStockCalendarApp"
    - groby_b 5y ago
      "Thank you, I've ordered 10 shares of AYME for $4495" The fundamental problem with voice assistants is an utter lack of common sense. Any human assistant not completely asleep at the wheel would flag the above because it's outside your normal patterns and ask for clarification. Voice assistants will just go ahead and do it. And then play a Siberian Metal Polka song because they thought they heard that too.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

jon-wood 5y ago

> And they didn't create an "App Store" or any other free extensible model for Siri. They should have, because people are on aggregate more creative than any big company including Apple -- thanks to survivorship bias. They did, its just not well advertised. Any app on iOS can expose actions to Siri, for example the BBC Sounds app exposes actions to start playing a specific radio station. Those actions are then available from Siri on your phone, and any HomePods that have been granted access to execute actions on your phone. On your point of looking at it like a command line, those same actions are also exposed to Shortcuts, allowing you to compose them in arbitrary pipelines. The output of one action can be passed into the output of another or even stuffed into a variable for later use. I've developed for all three of the major voice assistants and Siri is by far the best simply because it completely throws out the window the concept of developing a "voice application", voice is just one possible entry point into an iOS app.

redacted 5y ago

Ironically enough given its reputation, but this is what Bixby is great at - controlling the _device_ with your voice using short commands - "Open Camera", "Take photo", "Delete last photo" etc all work as expected (as a toy example, far more complicated stuff is possible even before including their Siri Shortcut equivalent)

Anonymous4272 5y ago

Can you not use voice typing with swiftkey (or any other keyboard) and open termux? I've done that a few times on android

pessimizer 5y ago

I've loved the idea of a verbal commandline, too, especially since watching the Play For Tomorrow episode "Shades[*]." It's a teen brave new worldish sort of thing, but all of the characters are constantly interacting with databases, networks and media (including VR) with this very stylized language, not how you would talk to a person. That's the problem, really. You have to use a stylized language on a commandline. A GUI is really just giving you a graphical diagram and guide to a really stylized language (if you reduce a GUI to its clickable/typeable areas.) It's very hard to draw an arrow pointing at a picture representing a particular predicate in the very restricted bandwidth of serialized sound. The reason why "Shades" was so interesting to me was that its future teens clearly all knew the stylized language well, and obviously would have learned it in school. To have that kind of universal training in a certain form of computer interaction would require a universal OS, like what UNIX quickly became. So maybe this is a conclusion coming off the above at an odd angle, but what I'm actually saying is that commandlines are hard and people don't like them. Visual, and even tactile stuff have the ability to offer so much feedback and so many affordances for amateur operators in comparison to audio that audio can't compete. Audio feedback is all exposition and nothing to hold onto or see. And just like film exposition, it often comes too slowly to keep people's attention, or too quickly for people to understand. It's always going to be easier to grab the knob and turn it, or to find the button and click it. The major advantage of audio interfaces is that they're cheap both materially (you don't need a screen or a control panel) and for the user (you don't have to stop walking, or sit down, or grab a thing, etc. you just speak.) For me these advantages are actually dominant over innate usability, which is why I also believe with you in the huge potential of audio interfaces as a platform. I just think that the only way to get there is to build a universal and open verbal protocol, with standardized interfaces for accessing databases, media, and networks. Something that children can (will) learn, and will have a lifetime of use. An opinionated and efficient design moonshot like the web (or the Bourne Shell or Gnu Corutils) turned out to be. A platform whose innovation comes from addition of new ways and not from subtraction of the old ones. A platform that holds onto backwards compatibility as long as is practical, thinking in terms of how many decades to keep things around, not how many releases, or possibly even a closed kernel that will never change built on top of some mathy orthogonal basis system. * I wish this hadn't been deleted from youtube.

5y ago

cpuguy83 5y ago

Siri sucks because it does t understand what you are saying at all, not because there aren't a million things hooked into it. To be fair, all the assistants are extremely bad at it, Siri just seems to be at the bottom of a bad list.