5 ms·
At least in the naming, sure. Everything else, not so much. I had to switch my whole house over to Echos because you can't change the wake word on Google Home.
by causi 4y ago
At least in the naming, sure. Everything else, not so much. I had to switch my whole house over to Echos because you can't change the wake word on Google Home. Every time I said, say, "Hey Google, turn the bedroom lamp off", the Home in the bedroom would say ok and turn the lamp off, both phones in the room would activate and complain that they didn't have a device named lamp listed, and every other Home in the house would start talking about how it couldn't hear me clearly. Then you yell "Hey Google, shut the fuck up!" and the blasted things start whining about how they "have feelings too" and I shouldn't be so rude. Few technological problems have made my fingers ache more for a sledgehammer.
- davidmurdoch 4y agoYou have to make sure the phones use the same Google (family) account as the Home.
- myself248 4y agoWere these devices given to you, or did you buy them?
- causi 4y agoA mix of both for the Google Home devices. The Echo dots I got on a black friday for like ten bucks a piece.
- bobsmooth 4y agoYou can't change the wake word because a separate, dedicated chip is listening for it and is not connected to the rest of the device except to wake up the main processor.
- Dylan16807 4y agoNot "because". Dedicated wakeup chips can be designed to have a different matrix shoved in for the word they're detecting. Google presumably did not do this, but they could have.
- causi 4y agoConsidering how warm Google Homes stay even when idle I seriously doubt the main processor is ever going to sleep.
- withinboredom 4y agoHeat is dissipated when electricity goes unused too (usually by dumping it in some load resistor) so it’s possible the extra electricity is just generating heat, waiting to go to the processor. I’d lol if they have 5v coming in, and they’re stepping it down to 3.3v for the wake word processor (hence heat) while the main processor runs at 5v.
- heavenlyblue 4y agoThey could just have a transformer that doesn't need a resistor for stepping it down
- causi 4y agoSwitch mode power supplies don't waste that degree of energy when doing nothing. That's multiple watts, probably at least 5 judging by the temperature, just being pissed away at all times.
- dTal 4y ago>Heat is dissipated when electricity goes unused too (usually by dumping it in some load resistor) This isn't true. Your light switches do not heat up to lightbulb temperature when the light is off. Heat is only dissipated when electricity is "used", more or less by definition. You seem to be describing a linear voltage regulator, which does have a load resistor and is wasteful if the step-down distance is large, but no modern electronic circuit would use such a thing in a power supply - it would use a switched-mode buck regulator instead.
- lultimouomo 4y agoI guess that's why laptops batteries last exactly the same whether the computer is idling or not. Also, the reason they get very hot when you're not doing anything CPU intensive - it's all that unused electricity going to the dump load resistor!
- vidarh 4y agoThen they could at least provide more than one option. Though while far from perfect, one of the things I like about Alexa/Echo more than the ability to change it, is that with multiple devices you will generally only trigger one (the others within earshot will listen and then ignore it once one of them has picked it up; works well in my house at least apart from one place where echo/reflection sometimes causes one in another room to get preference, but even then only one device usually triggers). Sounds like that was the main problem for GP. Most of the time I can just turn in the general direction of the device I want to "listen".
- causi 4y agoYep. Echoes also don't make you pause after the wake word, so you can actually talk to it naturally. Also, when you tell them to shut up they shut up. The way Google Homes throw a tantrum when you're rude to them will make you want to reach through the cable line and strangle the arrogant son of a bitch who OK'd something that pointlessly infuriating.
- bobsmooth 4y agoI've found that my Home Mini works best if I don't pause after saying the wake command.
- stavros 4y agoSeriously, what the hell were they thinking? If I'm so frustrated at a device that I'll tell it to shut up, the last thing I want from it is more noise.
- ocdtrekkie 4y agoI've read a few times about the concerns people have with voice assistants, which all predominantly default to female voices, taking orders and abuse without question. I believe Cortana was also intended to "stand up for herself" in these situations, to avoid making it seem okay/normal to bark abusive orders at a "woman".
- ilyt 4y agoI doubt that's burned into hardware so it just should have the option to update the fingerprint of the word
- heavenlyblue 4y agoUhm why is that chip not programmable for any ofher catch phrase?
- bobsmooth 4y agoThat would require more communication between the main chip and wake-up chip which could lead to privacy concerns.
- deadbunny 4y agoYou're installing a box that has a mic sending things you say intentionally and unintentionally (because it thinks you woke it up) to a megacorp. I think privacy is out the window by now.
- jdsnape 4y agoThat's interesting, I did some digging into Apple device communication and it turns out they have a protocol called CompanionLink that handles this exact circumstance - devices can communicate securely with each other and decide who is going to handle the Siri activation - HomePod's seem to get preference, then phones then laptops. I'm surprised Google hasn't done something similar.
- thedougd 4y agoThey do. You also get occasional feedback notifications asking you to confirm that the device that answered is the one you expected. More than one should never answer. I wonder if location is misconfigured on individual devices, but I wouldn't bet against a bug.
- tass 4y agoIt’s hard to infer the cause, but I wonder if the devices were set up under different accounts or not set within whatever Google defines as a home
- Al-Khwarizmi 4y agoI have no idea how things work under the hood, but this doesn't match my experience as a user. If I'm in the bedroom and ask to turn the lamp off, and phones are around, the phone screens sometimes lit up as they are listening to the command, but then only the bedroom Google Home actually executes it, while the phones turn their screen back off without saying anything.
- j_mo 4y agoUnfortunately I'm with the other guy. We have a Nest Mini in every room, and a Hub Max (only paid for 2, another 2 were free with Spotify and the Hub Max was an Instagram giveaway win). We have to whisper to the Hub Max in the kitchen, from 3 inches away, and the Minis in the dining room and living room often still hear. If I don't whisper, even the ones upstairs hear. Sometimes I get 2 timers for my cooking, sometimes I get one on the wrong speaker. Then I try to cancel the timer, and the Hub Max hears instead and tells me I have no timers set. The Hub Max asks on the screen if the wrong device responded. It clearly ignores your response, as the wrong device also responds the next time. I have pressed that button easily over 50x before I gave up and stopped. Something clearly changed ~6mo-1yr ago because they never used to be this bad. It used to be that they would all listen, then only the closest one (that heard the command the loudest) would respond. Problem is, when I'm cooking the Hub Max is 1ft away and the rest are through (often multiple) walls metres away from me.
- BLKNSLVR 4y agoJesus, they seem pretty sensitive to voice. Do they tell you not to be rude when you're having "adult time"? They'd know. They'd know.
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoThe developers of these things need to stop treating people swearing at them as a time to lecture them and instead realize that if someone is swearing at it then they’re probably not satisfied with how it’s functioning in the attempts before that.
- darth_aardvark 4y agoAlexa backend treats user swearing the same way it treats a repeated command or other negative feedback.
- bitpow 4y agoAnd how is that?
- natpalmer1776 4y agoI assume they capture the conversation for 'manual review' and upload it to an S3 bucket to languish for eternity.
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoGlad someone is, been trying to figure out if there was a command in Siri to communicate I'm dissatisfied with how its wasting my time with the past query attempts, no luck so far although I've basically given up using the thing at all at this point. The amount of times where I would ask 3 times and have to do the task myself anyway were too often.
- causi 4y agoFunny enough Google Assistant on Google Maps does this just fine. When it asks me if I wanted to navigate to the Pizza Hut that's five miles away or the one that's 38 miles away, it understands "the closest one, you stupid piece of crap" just fine.
- kaibee 4y agoHaha I wrote a HN comment years ago about the same issue. Everytime "do you want to go to the Wegman's 5 miles away or the identical Wegman's that's 20 miles away?"
- headsoup 4y agoWell, you've chosen convenience over time and here you are.
- ruuda 4y ago> At least in the naming, sure. https://goomics.net/239/ https://goomics.net/239/
- tass 4y agoIf this means you set each echo with a different wake word, you probably don’t need to do that. As long as each one knows about the other (same account) they choose a single device to respond based on the one which heard you best. Google should have done that too, but it seems you might not have had them all part of the same home (or something else was broken/buggy).