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I haven't used Alexa in sometime, but the current state of Siri leads me to believe that after a decade of heavy investment, core technology just isn't mature e

I haven't used Alexa in sometime, but the current state of Siri leads me to believe that after a decade of heavy investment, core technology just isn't mature enough for voice assistants to provide much value. Ex, siri is great with a simple command like, "hey siri, play something I like." But struggles mightily to do anything beyond...

seventytwo 4y ago
Ive used Alexa to order our regular dog food a handful of times, and it ended up being easier to just get my phone out, find it, and buy it there. If there’s any background noise, Alexa struggles - TV, music, kids playing, etc. The interactions are super slow. Voice command stuff won’t be broadly useful to people until they can damn near read your mind. I can translate my thoughts into actions far faster with buttons and a device than I can explaining it to a voice assistant. That’s the real technical challenge here. Alexa doesn’t have to be better than Siri. It has to be better than me using my phone or a computer.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  Naively, a voice assistant with the comprehension of old Wolfram Alpha could be cool: Wolfram used to understand questions like “what’s the mass of the Earth divided by the mass of the solar system?” I think a voice assistant that can take such natural language questions and answer would be fun — asking Alexa is less disruptive to a conversation than taking out a phone; but somehow, Wolfram has regressed and voice assistants never reached that level.
  - rpastuszak 4y ago
    heh, I built sth like this in 2013-14! It was a web app using regular browser APIs: 1. use text to speech to create the query text 2. send the query to Wolfram alpha 3. clean up the response and read it using speech to text I might've used Ivona (a speech to text service later acquired by Amazon IIRC). It worked really well in Chrome and had for a bonus it was designed to look like HAL. (I used the pulsating dot as a loading spinner). Edit: I found it! https://github.com/paprikka/sulik https://github.com/paprikka/sulik
- m000 4y ago
  Yes, not being able to filter out background noise is the one thing that makes voice assistants useless. Whenever I am on the go and tried to get Google Assistant to play me a tune on Spotify, it got it right perhaps 1/20. Worse, around 15/20, it will play me something completely unrelated, that I have no interest in listening to. In the end, I have up on GA, and just stop for a minute, pull the phone out of my pocket and manually pick what I want.
  - xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
    Alexa is the best voice interface for filtering out background noise by a considerable margin, in my experience. It's very flexible in what it accepts. Google is very rigid. Try asking Google Assistant to shut the fuck up. Siri isn't bad but it's too device focused.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      In my experience, voice recognition isn't really the issue. It's comprehending what you want it to do beyond a formulaic wizard's incantation.
    - shagie 4y ago
      Alexa devices have had some of the most iteration on improving the hardware and some impressive back end systems. The integration with Audible, amazon music, and many other streaming systems is impressive. Part of that is because the architecture is very much the "brains" hosted in the cloud allowing AWS to other service to be better made. Google is very much a "search google" and interact with Google's tools... which don't seem to be as well integrated. The "I want to add X to my calendar" is fine, but things like setting up Sirius XM to stream to Google or the Hue lighting setup was awkward (at the time) and didn't work as well when I was comparing the systems. At one time (it no longer appears to be the case - which is disappointing), Alexa appeared to have a knowledge engine behind it. You could do things like "what color is a light red flower" and then get back "a pink flower is pink". Incidentally asking what color a blue bird was came back with "a blue bird is blue, brown, and red" giving a hint at that knowledge engine worked from some system behind it rather than tautological responses for other silly questions that I asked. Now that comes back with "According to an Alexa Answers contributor..." Asking "Who invented the C programming language" used to respond back "Denis Ritchie" and "what did Denis Ritchie invent" returned back "Denis Ritchie invited the C programming language." This Alexa knowledge engine appears to have reverted to "search Wikipedia." Siri doesn't appear to be trying to be a general assistant and is instead focusing on HomeKit automation and special "this is what you can do with it." Compare writing a skill for Alexa is "write a program and host it on AWS" - but the skills can do, pretty much anything. If you look at Siri "Intents" ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit and https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/technologies/siri/system-intents/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... ) you'll see that the standard intents are very limited and in those domains, Siri is pretty accurate on what is done. For general queries, Siri used to partner with Wolfram - but this doesn't appear to be the case anymore. It was a meh integration when it was in place. These differences in how the device behaves comes from some fairly fundamental architectural decisions. Siri is fairly self supporting, even if limited. Alexa has its brains in AWS and as things become less profitable, Alexa becomes less useful for those things. Google has (to me) always been an also ran because I'm not invested in the google ecosystem for stuff and getting responses where it just reads the first page in google searches is boring.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  There's a New Zealand detective series (starring Lucy Lawless!) where the main character's name is Alexa. Hilarity ensues.
aetherson 4y ago
I find Alexa/Echoes great for a highly limited set of use cases. Like, I use it all the time to set timers in my kitchen (it's really nice when you've got like four timers going and when they go off they say their name). Adding things to grocery lists is great. We use it to set the light level of our "smart" bedroom light. Checking weather before you go out when your hands are full of other stuff is nice. A few other things.
- NBJack 4y ago
  Spot on. I can vouch for all those use cases plus I enjoy my Amazon Music sub on it. Everything else they've added often makes the experience for those very core things worse.
  - aetherson 4y ago
    We don't get our music through Amazon, so we don't get that use case, but I imagine it'd be nice.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I don't know about Spotify but you can set things up so that Apple Music is it's default music service, i.e. you can pretty much play music in the same manner as if you had an Amazon subscription. It's still pretty unreliable but you can do it.
    - kennend3 4y ago
      If you enjoy having to repeat yourself 3 or 4 times to get it to actually work.. you can connect it to Spotify. It use to work great, but the last year i find i need to repeat "play music" several times before if actually plays something. Usually it tells me it is playing music, but doesn't...
- kyriakos 4y ago
  Grocery list is my no1 user of Google Assistant. The only thing that works everytime. Sometimes I ask general questions while driving and I get a good answer, things that answers questions that come up while taking to another passenger in the car. Single answer questions work well e.g. "what is the diameter of the moon?" (don't judge we talk about weird stuff during long drives).
binkHN 4y ago
For what it's worth, I find the Google Assistant better than Siri, but not much better. The functionality of the product hasn't improved much since it was delivered, and this includes the "smart" speaker hardware that they regularly refresh.
- topicseed 4y ago
  Yep, great for quick commands but kind of useless beyond the weather, music, and quickies (news, agenda). And not seeing much progress so .....
solardev 4y ago
Siri is the worst of them. Try Google's sometime, it's much much better.

seventytwo 4y ago

Ive used Alexa to order our regular dog food a handful of times, and it ended up being easier to just get my phone out, find it, and buy it there. If there’s any background noise, Alexa struggles - TV, music, kids playing, etc. The interactions are super slow. Voice command stuff won’t be broadly useful to people until they can damn near read your mind. I can translate my thoughts into actions far faster with buttons and a device than I can explaining it to a voice assistant. That’s the real technical challenge here. Alexa doesn’t have to be better than Siri. It has to be better than me using my phone or a computer.

zmgsabst 4y ago
Naively, a voice assistant with the comprehension of old Wolfram Alpha could be cool: Wolfram used to understand questions like “what’s the mass of the Earth divided by the mass of the solar system?” I think a voice assistant that can take such natural language questions and answer would be fun — asking Alexa is less disruptive to a conversation than taking out a phone; but somehow, Wolfram has regressed and voice assistants never reached that level.
- rpastuszak 4y ago
  heh, I built sth like this in 2013-14! It was a web app using regular browser APIs: 1. use text to speech to create the query text 2. send the query to Wolfram alpha 3. clean up the response and read it using speech to text I might've used Ivona (a speech to text service later acquired by Amazon IIRC). It worked really well in Chrome and had for a bonus it was designed to look like HAL. (I used the pulsating dot as a loading spinner). Edit: I found it! https://github.com/paprikka/sulik https://github.com/paprikka/sulik
m000 4y ago
Yes, not being able to filter out background noise is the one thing that makes voice assistants useless. Whenever I am on the go and tried to get Google Assistant to play me a tune on Spotify, it got it right perhaps 1/20. Worse, around 15/20, it will play me something completely unrelated, that I have no interest in listening to. In the end, I have up on GA, and just stop for a minute, pull the phone out of my pocket and manually pick what I want.
- xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
  Alexa is the best voice interface for filtering out background noise by a considerable margin, in my experience. It's very flexible in what it accepts. Google is very rigid. Try asking Google Assistant to shut the fuck up. Siri isn't bad but it's too device focused.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    In my experience, voice recognition isn't really the issue. It's comprehending what you want it to do beyond a formulaic wizard's incantation.
  - shagie 4y ago
    Alexa devices have had some of the most iteration on improving the hardware and some impressive back end systems. The integration with Audible, amazon music, and many other streaming systems is impressive. Part of that is because the architecture is very much the "brains" hosted in the cloud allowing AWS to other service to be better made. Google is very much a "search google" and interact with Google's tools... which don't seem to be as well integrated. The "I want to add X to my calendar" is fine, but things like setting up Sirius XM to stream to Google or the Hue lighting setup was awkward (at the time) and didn't work as well when I was comparing the systems. At one time (it no longer appears to be the case - which is disappointing), Alexa appeared to have a knowledge engine behind it. You could do things like "what color is a light red flower" and then get back "a pink flower is pink". Incidentally asking what color a blue bird was came back with "a blue bird is blue, brown, and red" giving a hint at that knowledge engine worked from some system behind it rather than tautological responses for other silly questions that I asked. Now that comes back with "According to an Alexa Answers contributor..." Asking "Who invented the C programming language" used to respond back "Denis Ritchie" and "what did Denis Ritchie invent" returned back "Denis Ritchie invited the C programming language." This Alexa knowledge engine appears to have reverted to "search Wikipedia." Siri doesn't appear to be trying to be a general assistant and is instead focusing on HomeKit automation and special "this is what you can do with it." Compare writing a skill for Alexa is "write a program and host it on AWS" - but the skills can do, pretty much anything. If you look at Siri "Intents" ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit and https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/technologies/siri/system-intents/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... ) you'll see that the standard intents are very limited and in those domains, Siri is pretty accurate on what is done. For general queries, Siri used to partner with Wolfram - but this doesn't appear to be the case anymore. It was a meh integration when it was in place. These differences in how the device behaves comes from some fairly fundamental architectural decisions. Siri is fairly self supporting, even if limited. Alexa has its brains in AWS and as things become less profitable, Alexa becomes less useful for those things. Google has (to me) always been an also ran because I'm not invested in the google ecosystem for stuff and getting responses where it just reads the first page in google searches is boring.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
There's a New Zealand detective series (starring Lucy Lawless!) where the main character's name is Alexa. Hilarity ensues.

aetherson 4y ago

I find Alexa/Echoes great for a highly limited set of use cases. Like, I use it all the time to set timers in my kitchen (it's really nice when you've got like four timers going and when they go off they say their name). Adding things to grocery lists is great. We use it to set the light level of our "smart" bedroom light. Checking weather before you go out when your hands are full of other stuff is nice. A few other things.

NBJack 4y ago
Spot on. I can vouch for all those use cases plus I enjoy my Amazon Music sub on it. Everything else they've added often makes the experience for those very core things worse.
- aetherson 4y ago
  We don't get our music through Amazon, so we don't get that use case, but I imagine it'd be nice.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I don't know about Spotify but you can set things up so that Apple Music is it's default music service, i.e. you can pretty much play music in the same manner as if you had an Amazon subscription. It's still pretty unreliable but you can do it.
  - kennend3 4y ago
    If you enjoy having to repeat yourself 3 or 4 times to get it to actually work.. you can connect it to Spotify. It use to work great, but the last year i find i need to repeat "play music" several times before if actually plays something. Usually it tells me it is playing music, but doesn't...
kyriakos 4y ago
Grocery list is my no1 user of Google Assistant. The only thing that works everytime. Sometimes I ask general questions while driving and I get a good answer, things that answers questions that come up while taking to another passenger in the car. Single answer questions work well e.g. "what is the diameter of the moon?" (don't judge we talk about weird stuff during long drives).

binkHN 4y ago

For what it's worth, I find the Google Assistant better than Siri, but not much better. The functionality of the product hasn't improved much since it was delivered, and this includes the "smart" speaker hardware that they regularly refresh.

topicseed 4y ago
Yep, great for quick commands but kind of useless beyond the weather, music, and quickies (news, agenda). And not seeing much progress so .....

solardev 4y ago

Siri is the worst of them. Try Google's sometime, it's much much better.