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I think it's fairly clear now that the only time a voice based UI is better is when the user is unable to use their hands. Driving or in the kitchen when cookin

I think it's fairly clear now that the only time a voice based UI is better is when the user is unable to use their hands. Driving or in the kitchen when cooking seem the be the most successful. The are barely any other strong use cases. On top of that the general distrust of the privacy of these systems has stoped a significant number of people (myself included) from wanting to us them at all. I don't have an in home device, and have turned off Siri on my Apple devices.

dmitriid 4y ago
> Driving or in the kitchen when cooking seem the be the most successful. Since the voice assistants are incredibly stupid I find it extremely stressful and distracting to ask them for anything while driving.
- swores 4y ago
  Figuring out what works well or not while driving isn't a great idea, but using the ones that work well seems fine for most people. Saying "Hey Siri, text Fred <pause> I'm on my way but stuck in traffic, eta 4 o'clock" or something along those lines nearly always works fine for me and is no more distracting than having a conversation with somebody in the car with me. If Siri gets some of the message wrong I'll either send a new one using clearer speech or wait until I'm not driving to fix it if the mistake isn't important. Sure, it would be possible to then allow myself to get distracted by focussing too much on some weird aspect of it, but equally it would be possible to get so emotional in a conversation with somebody sat next to you that you stop paying attention to the road. And we (most people at least) don't say "it's not safe to talk at all while driving", we just make sure not to go over that line of getting too distracted by the conversation.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > or something along those lines nearly always works fine for me and is no more distracting than having a conversation with somebody in the car with me. Until you have several Freds in your contact list. Until you have friends with foreign/uncommon names. As long as you have near-perfect American pronunciation. As long as... There are too many variables to consider and think of. Sometimes I can't get Siri to reliably understand what music I want (and my Engilsh is pretty darn good), much less anything more advanced.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      > As long as you have near-perfect American pronunciation. There isn’t a such thing as an American accent. Ask anyone who is not a native speaker and either hasn’t been to US that long and tries to understand my natural deep southern accent. I can adjust my accent if needed and if I think about it.
      - simiones 4y ago
        There is an accent that is typically called "standard American" or something along those lines, which is what you'll hear on things like national news programs. I'm not sure how many Americans actually speak with this accent, but it's usually the one that all of these devices target initially.
        dmitriid 4y ago
        Yeah, I was thinking along the lines of "General American"/"California English": - General American https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/united-states-of-accents-general-american https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/united-states-of-accents-... - California English https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/the-united-states-of-accents-california-english https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/the-united-states-of-acce...
        JohnFen 4y ago
        The "Standard American" accent is the west coast (mostly California) accent. It is far from universal.
        whimsicalism 4y ago
        It is Midwestern and, while not universal, it is the majority of speakers on the coasts and people I have met from the Midwest.
        ghaff 4y ago
        It's essentially how a homogenized middle+ class of people born/raised in/around metropolitan areas that aren't in the South/Texas speak. (In general, stereotypical accents associated with various cities are mostly more of a working class thing, e.g. Southie in Boston.) The South is the main outlier. Colleagues I work with from and living in North Carolina generally have a distinct southern accent albeit a mostly slight one. But, yeah, historically we'd have called it Midwestern.
  - simiones 4y ago
    > Hey Siri, text Fred <pause> I'm on my way but stuck in traffic, eta 4 o'clock That only works well if you have an accent it recognizes, if you're speech is clear (not slurred, not lisping etc), if you don't stammer, if you don't have any verbal tics that you don't want to show up in the message, and if "Fred" is actually a simple unambigous name. Otherwise, at best when you want to send a message to "Ioana" it may end up sending a message to "Anna" that says "I'm, ummm, oh my way! and stalking traffic ate a what was it like 4 like maybe 4 and you know what <pause>" (followed by the "4 o'clock" that will no longer be included).
- enobrev 4y ago
  Google (android auto) was significantly better at this early on than it is now. I used to be able to search random topics by voice while driving, and it would read me excerpts and results. I used it often. Now it's map-specific, messaging, or music-specific and nothing else.
gcanyon 4y ago
I disagree: a voice based UI is better IFF: 1. The command set is broad enough or user input is complex enough to make other UIs inefficient. 2. The voice UI is up to the task of correctly interpreting the voice input correctly most of the time What "most of the time" means for the second item is somewhat personal and use-case specific. For item 1, examples where voice is better right now, or could be with reasonable NLU improvements: "Text my wife that I'll be there in five minutes." "Get me driving directions to the nearest Indian restaurant with at least 3 stars on Yelp." "Order six rolls of paper towels and a bottle of Windex from Walmart, delivered to my home address, for delivery by Saturday" "Remind me tomorrow morning to review this web page" "Create a shopping list with the items from this recipe" "Create a basic presentation with one slide each for each entry in the table of contents for this book" Voice can be better. As others have pointed out, as long as it's like playing Zork where half the time the response is "you can't do that" or "I don't understand", voice interfaces will continue to flounder.
goosedragons 4y ago
I don't think that's true. It's way faster for things like smart lights and playing music. The problem is it's still so limited for other things. For example I can tell Alexa to play The Simpsons on Fire TV, it will do so on Disney+ but always the first episode even though the last watched one was in Season 15. It also can't seem to find my purchased episodes from iTunes (watchable with the Apple TV app on Fire TV). Simple searches also have a high chance of being misunderstood still with poor results. I think if the accuracy was better and more content/things were available through voice it would be a pretty good input method for any scenario where you don't need visual feedback.
- samwillis 4y ago
  Selecting content via voice only works when you can either name exactly the content you want, or you are choosing a general category to play. Browsing content, or looking it up, via voice is slow and playful, it always will be. Who what's to be saying "next", "scroll down", or have a full on conversation with an AI to try and work out what you want to play? Our fingers on our hands have evolved to be incredible at interacting with things, we are good at using them. Touch screens or physical UIs will never be superseded by voice. So yes, there is a small use case for voice for controlling music/tv, or controlling a few things in the home (heating, blinds, lights) but thats it, I don't believe there is this massive opportunity to expand it into our everyday lives where we are constantly interacting with devices via voice.
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    You don't need to name content exactly. Saying "Alexa, play the sandwich song from Frozen" for example will correctly play Love is an Open Door. Ideally this kind of thing would work for TV and movies too, web searches as well. Humans evolved language to communicate ideas, wants and desires to others for thousands of years. Obviously voice UI is not there now but maybe someday the experience won't be much different than asking the movie rental store clerk for their recommendations for a romantic comedy.
    - samwillis 4y ago
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
>the only time a voice based UI is better is when the user is unable to use their hands. Driving my observation of people on the road has led me to conclude that Driving is an activity where people think they can do absolutely anything else while engaged in it.
- bluGill 4y ago
  When you put it like that you will get a lot of upvotes. However for almost all specifics you will get a ton of downvotes when you name them, and probably someone saying no that is okay. (these days if you say "you can't drink alcohol while driving" you are safe, 30 years ago if there had been an internet people would have said you are wrong)
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    things I've seen I think are probably not ok. 1. sending messages on phone while driving, one hand on steering wheel. 2. having sex / receiving oral sex. 3. turned around, yelling at kid in back seat to not fight with other kid in back seat. 4. girlfriend having argument with boyfriend, slapping him on arm some, about how she was smart too just a different kind of smart while swerving back and forth in fast merging traffic near the Haight (I was in back seat) 5. it's getting hot in here, time to take my jacket off! your mileage may vary of course.
fxtentacle 4y ago
Fully agree on the privacy distrust. BTW, another use case for speech recognition is when you're carrying a baby around.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  I've gotten pretty good at doing chores one handed...
- maweki 4y ago
  I'd say my baby preferred me playing around with my phone than speaking up. Doubly so when they were carried around sleeping.
kevsim 4y ago
Totally agree. "Hey Siri, start a timer for X minutes" and "Hey Siri, play Y on Spotify" are the entire extent of my voice assistant interactions.
- aflag 4y ago
  And I’m always annoyed that it doesn’t tell me how long I set each timer to when I have multiple timers, just the remaining time, which makes it hard for me to know which is which.
  - cmckn 4y ago
    It’s not encouraging that even the most common use cases for these systems still have rough edges. The Google ones do support named timers, so you can say “start a pasta timer” and later ask “what’s left on my pasta timer” etc. I thought Siri added this at some point, but I wouldn’t be surprised if not.
    - sbuk 4y ago
      It does. "Hey Siri, set a timer for 45 minutes called pasta bake", "Hey Siri, how long left on pasta bake?" works.
      - aflag 4y ago
        Actually, it seems that google is now able to cope with things a bit better. I've just tried and I can now ask for "how long left on my 45-minute timer?" and it does finally answer. It actually also shows up in the UI. That is sort of recent, though, as I've had that problem earlier this year. It seems that siri is now unable to set multiple timers, though. Anyway, it does seem to have improved, but I wonder why that stuff wasn't in from day one. It seems pretty obvious to me.
        sbuk 4y ago
        Nope, Siri can also do multiple timers. It asks for an name if an unnamed timer of the same length already exists.
red_Seashell_32 4y ago
Or in countries where we get snow during Autumn. Getting messages read-out loud, and responding with voice-to-speech is great too
algesten 4y ago
And then it typically interacts and fails without feedback. I've tried so many times to tell Siri "Send a message to x that I'm 10 mins away", only to realize much later that "message delivery failed". No clear feedback, a weird timing issues where it just stalls and show the message it' about to send in case it got it wrong. It's just a terrible UX all around.
- causi 4y ago
  I've had to stop using Google Assistant to send messages. It used to ask the user to choose the correct word when it misheard something. Now it just makes a wild-ass guess and sends it on. It's caused me to send some very odd messages to people and/or look like an idiot.
thiht 4y ago
> Driving Siri never triggers when I'm driving, it just doesn't hear me. I think it's because of the noise of the car or because of my music, but it doesn't work. I have to move my face closer to my phone so that it can hear me, but that's even more dangerous than using the controls. Same when I'm in the shower and I ask it to change the music, it doesn't hear me, I have to shout and get angry every time.
- balfirevic 4y ago
  Is your phone mounted close to the air vent? Siri hears me perfectly in my car, even when the phone is in my pocket but it doesn't hear me at all when I mount the phone on the air vent.
  - thiht 4y ago
    Yes, it is. Maybe it doesn't hear me because of that. For what it's worth, it doesn't work either when it's my pocket. When I come home and ask it to turn the lights on, it doesn't answer if it's not in my hand.
    - Tagbert 4y ago
      You might try blowing the microphone holes with a can of air. It may be clogged with pocket lint.
    - balfirevic 4y ago
      That might be a separate issue - you have to specifically enable a setting which will make the phone listen for Hey Siri when it's face down (or in the pocket). See here: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iphaff1d606/ios#iph4a9e2c917 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iphaff1d606/ios...
college_physics 4y ago
> when the user is unable to use their hands this is still potentially a huge domain. one could imagine a benign scenario where voice assistants enhance people's abilities to interact with each other (and digital devices) when a more potent UI is not within reach privacy concerns (->controversial business models) and technical ability to deliver a desirable service (that people would pay for) might indeed prevent this vision from catching on in the short term another factor that may complicate adoption might be just cultural / perceptions. It is a somewhat odd thing to be shouting at devices - especially in the presence of other people. User interfaces that interfere strongly with communication habits and behaviors established over millennia (see also wearing VR goggles) might have a harder time seeing adoption outside very specific scenarios
wintermutestwin 4y ago
>Driving While driving, I wanted to have Siri read a lengthy webpage to me. I pulled up the page, got in the car and asked Siri to "speak screen." Siri says it can't do that when I am driving! What idiot thought that was a necessary safety measure? What if I were the passenger? Overall, I am stunned at how bad Siri is at things that don't even require AI. It's almost as if this insanely profitable company failed to invest a tiny bit of money into researching ways that people would like to use Siri.
- JCharante 4y ago
  > What if I were the passenger? I often go places with my sister (she drives). Her car doesn't allow pairing or swapping bluetooth connections to the car's entertainment system while it's moving. If we want to switch to my phone we have to come to a complete stop.
genocidicbunny 4y ago
Even while driving, it's useless past basic commands. My most egregious example of this for me is that there's a grocery store near me that the Google assistant is incapable of finding because of a few people in my contacts list. Whenever I try to ask it for directions to that store, it picks (at pretty much random) one of three of my contacts instead. This is despite the only common part of said contacts' names and the grocery store is that their names all start with the same letter. Basically, imagine asking for directions to Albertsons, and the assistant giving you directions to Andrew.

dmitriid 4y ago

> Driving or in the kitchen when cooking seem the be the most successful. Since the voice assistants are incredibly stupid I find it extremely stressful and distracting to ask them for anything while driving.

swores 4y ago
Figuring out what works well or not while driving isn't a great idea, but using the ones that work well seems fine for most people. Saying "Hey Siri, text Fred <pause> I'm on my way but stuck in traffic, eta 4 o'clock" or something along those lines nearly always works fine for me and is no more distracting than having a conversation with somebody in the car with me. If Siri gets some of the message wrong I'll either send a new one using clearer speech or wait until I'm not driving to fix it if the mistake isn't important. Sure, it would be possible to then allow myself to get distracted by focussing too much on some weird aspect of it, but equally it would be possible to get so emotional in a conversation with somebody sat next to you that you stop paying attention to the road. And we (most people at least) don't say "it's not safe to talk at all while driving", we just make sure not to go over that line of getting too distracted by the conversation.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > or something along those lines nearly always works fine for me and is no more distracting than having a conversation with somebody in the car with me. Until you have several Freds in your contact list. Until you have friends with foreign/uncommon names. As long as you have near-perfect American pronunciation. As long as... There are too many variables to consider and think of. Sometimes I can't get Siri to reliably understand what music I want (and my Engilsh is pretty darn good), much less anything more advanced.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    > As long as you have near-perfect American pronunciation. There isn’t a such thing as an American accent. Ask anyone who is not a native speaker and either hasn’t been to US that long and tries to understand my natural deep southern accent. I can adjust my accent if needed and if I think about it.
    - simiones 4y ago
      There is an accent that is typically called "standard American" or something along those lines, which is what you'll hear on things like national news programs. I'm not sure how many Americans actually speak with this accent, but it's usually the one that all of these devices target initially.
      - dmitriid 4y ago
        Yeah, I was thinking along the lines of "General American"/"California English": - General American https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/united-states-of-accents-general-american https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/united-states-of-accents-... - California English https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/the-united-states-of-accents-california-english https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/the-united-states-of-acce...
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        The "Standard American" accent is the west coast (mostly California) accent. It is far from universal.
        whimsicalism 4y ago
        It is Midwestern and, while not universal, it is the majority of speakers on the coasts and people I have met from the Midwest.
        ghaff 4y ago
        It's essentially how a homogenized middle+ class of people born/raised in/around metropolitan areas that aren't in the South/Texas speak. (In general, stereotypical accents associated with various cities are mostly more of a working class thing, e.g. Southie in Boston.) The South is the main outlier. Colleagues I work with from and living in North Carolina generally have a distinct southern accent albeit a mostly slight one. But, yeah, historically we'd have called it Midwestern.
- simiones 4y ago
  > Hey Siri, text Fred <pause> I'm on my way but stuck in traffic, eta 4 o'clock That only works well if you have an accent it recognizes, if you're speech is clear (not slurred, not lisping etc), if you don't stammer, if you don't have any verbal tics that you don't want to show up in the message, and if "Fred" is actually a simple unambigous name. Otherwise, at best when you want to send a message to "Ioana" it may end up sending a message to "Anna" that says "I'm, ummm, oh my way! and stalking traffic ate a what was it like 4 like maybe 4 and you know what <pause>" (followed by the "4 o'clock" that will no longer be included).
enobrev 4y ago
Google (android auto) was significantly better at this early on than it is now. I used to be able to search random topics by voice while driving, and it would read me excerpts and results. I used it often. Now it's map-specific, messaging, or music-specific and nothing else.

gcanyon 4y ago

I disagree: a voice based UI is better IFF: 1. The command set is broad enough or user input is complex enough to make other UIs inefficient. 2. The voice UI is up to the task of correctly interpreting the voice input correctly most of the time What "most of the time" means for the second item is somewhat personal and use-case specific. For item 1, examples where voice is better right now, or could be with reasonable NLU improvements: "Text my wife that I'll be there in five minutes." "Get me driving directions to the nearest Indian restaurant with at least 3 stars on Yelp." "Order six rolls of paper towels and a bottle of Windex from Walmart, delivered to my home address, for delivery by Saturday" "Remind me tomorrow morning to review this web page" "Create a shopping list with the items from this recipe" "Create a basic presentation with one slide each for each entry in the table of contents for this book" Voice can be better. As others have pointed out, as long as it's like playing Zork where half the time the response is "you can't do that" or "I don't understand", voice interfaces will continue to flounder.

goosedragons 4y ago

I don't think that's true. It's way faster for things like smart lights and playing music. The problem is it's still so limited for other things. For example I can tell Alexa to play The Simpsons on Fire TV, it will do so on Disney+ but always the first episode even though the last watched one was in Season 15. It also can't seem to find my purchased episodes from iTunes (watchable with the Apple TV app on Fire TV). Simple searches also have a high chance of being misunderstood still with poor results. I think if the accuracy was better and more content/things were available through voice it would be a pretty good input method for any scenario where you don't need visual feedback.

samwillis 4y ago
Selecting content via voice only works when you can either name exactly the content you want, or you are choosing a general category to play. Browsing content, or looking it up, via voice is slow and playful, it always will be. Who what's to be saying "next", "scroll down", or have a full on conversation with an AI to try and work out what you want to play? Our fingers on our hands have evolved to be incredible at interacting with things, we are good at using them. Touch screens or physical UIs will never be superseded by voice. So yes, there is a small use case for voice for controlling music/tv, or controlling a few things in the home (heating, blinds, lights) but thats it, I don't believe there is this massive opportunity to expand it into our everyday lives where we are constantly interacting with devices via voice.
- goosedragons 4y ago
  You don't need to name content exactly. Saying "Alexa, play the sandwich song from Frozen" for example will correctly play Love is an Open Door. Ideally this kind of thing would work for TV and movies too, web searches as well. Humans evolved language to communicate ideas, wants and desires to others for thousands of years. Obviously voice UI is not there now but maybe someday the experience won't be much different than asking the movie rental store clerk for their recommendations for a romantic comedy.
  - samwillis 4y ago

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

>the only time a voice based UI is better is when the user is unable to use their hands. Driving my observation of people on the road has led me to conclude that Driving is an activity where people think they can do absolutely anything else while engaged in it.

bluGill 4y ago
When you put it like that you will get a lot of upvotes. However for almost all specifics you will get a ton of downvotes when you name them, and probably someone saying no that is okay. (these days if you say "you can't drink alcohol while driving" you are safe, 30 years ago if there had been an internet people would have said you are wrong)
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  things I've seen I think are probably not ok. 1. sending messages on phone while driving, one hand on steering wheel. 2. having sex / receiving oral sex. 3. turned around, yelling at kid in back seat to not fight with other kid in back seat. 4. girlfriend having argument with boyfriend, slapping him on arm some, about how she was smart too just a different kind of smart while swerving back and forth in fast merging traffic near the Haight (I was in back seat) 5. it's getting hot in here, time to take my jacket off! your mileage may vary of course.

fxtentacle 4y ago

Fully agree on the privacy distrust. BTW, another use case for speech recognition is when you're carrying a baby around.

newaccount74 4y ago
I've gotten pretty good at doing chores one handed...
maweki 4y ago
I'd say my baby preferred me playing around with my phone than speaking up. Doubly so when they were carried around sleeping.

kevsim 4y ago

Totally agree. "Hey Siri, start a timer for X minutes" and "Hey Siri, play Y on Spotify" are the entire extent of my voice assistant interactions.

aflag 4y ago
And I’m always annoyed that it doesn’t tell me how long I set each timer to when I have multiple timers, just the remaining time, which makes it hard for me to know which is which.
- cmckn 4y ago
  It’s not encouraging that even the most common use cases for these systems still have rough edges. The Google ones do support named timers, so you can say “start a pasta timer” and later ask “what’s left on my pasta timer” etc. I thought Siri added this at some point, but I wouldn’t be surprised if not.
  - sbuk 4y ago
    It does. "Hey Siri, set a timer for 45 minutes called pasta bake", "Hey Siri, how long left on pasta bake?" works.
    - aflag 4y ago
      Actually, it seems that google is now able to cope with things a bit better. I've just tried and I can now ask for "how long left on my 45-minute timer?" and it does finally answer. It actually also shows up in the UI. That is sort of recent, though, as I've had that problem earlier this year. It seems that siri is now unable to set multiple timers, though. Anyway, it does seem to have improved, but I wonder why that stuff wasn't in from day one. It seems pretty obvious to me.
      - sbuk 4y ago
        Nope, Siri can also do multiple timers. It asks for an name if an unnamed timer of the same length already exists.

red_Seashell_32 4y ago

Or in countries where we get snow during Autumn. Getting messages read-out loud, and responding with voice-to-speech is great too

algesten 4y ago

And then it typically interacts and fails without feedback. I've tried so many times to tell Siri "Send a message to x that I'm 10 mins away", only to realize much later that "message delivery failed". No clear feedback, a weird timing issues where it just stalls and show the message it' about to send in case it got it wrong. It's just a terrible UX all around.

causi 4y ago
I've had to stop using Google Assistant to send messages. It used to ask the user to choose the correct word when it misheard something. Now it just makes a wild-ass guess and sends it on. It's caused me to send some very odd messages to people and/or look like an idiot.

thiht 4y ago

> Driving Siri never triggers when I'm driving, it just doesn't hear me. I think it's because of the noise of the car or because of my music, but it doesn't work. I have to move my face closer to my phone so that it can hear me, but that's even more dangerous than using the controls. Same when I'm in the shower and I ask it to change the music, it doesn't hear me, I have to shout and get angry every time.

balfirevic 4y ago
Is your phone mounted close to the air vent? Siri hears me perfectly in my car, even when the phone is in my pocket but it doesn't hear me at all when I mount the phone on the air vent.
- thiht 4y ago
  Yes, it is. Maybe it doesn't hear me because of that. For what it's worth, it doesn't work either when it's my pocket. When I come home and ask it to turn the lights on, it doesn't answer if it's not in my hand.
  - Tagbert 4y ago
    You might try blowing the microphone holes with a can of air. It may be clogged with pocket lint.
  - balfirevic 4y ago
    That might be a separate issue - you have to specifically enable a setting which will make the phone listen for Hey Siri when it's face down (or in the pocket). See here: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iphaff1d606/ios#iph4a9e2c917 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iphaff1d606/ios...

college_physics 4y ago

> when the user is unable to use their hands this is still potentially a huge domain. one could imagine a benign scenario where voice assistants enhance people's abilities to interact with each other (and digital devices) when a more potent UI is not within reach privacy concerns (->controversial business models) and technical ability to deliver a desirable service (that people would pay for) might indeed prevent this vision from catching on in the short term another factor that may complicate adoption might be just cultural / perceptions. It is a somewhat odd thing to be shouting at devices - especially in the presence of other people. User interfaces that interfere strongly with communication habits and behaviors established over millennia (see also wearing VR goggles) might have a harder time seeing adoption outside very specific scenarios

wintermutestwin 4y ago

>Driving While driving, I wanted to have Siri read a lengthy webpage to me. I pulled up the page, got in the car and asked Siri to "speak screen." Siri says it can't do that when I am driving! What idiot thought that was a necessary safety measure? What if I were the passenger? Overall, I am stunned at how bad Siri is at things that don't even require AI. It's almost as if this insanely profitable company failed to invest a tiny bit of money into researching ways that people would like to use Siri.

JCharante 4y ago
> What if I were the passenger? I often go places with my sister (she drives). Her car doesn't allow pairing or swapping bluetooth connections to the car's entertainment system while it's moving. If we want to switch to my phone we have to come to a complete stop.

genocidicbunny 4y ago

Even while driving, it's useless past basic commands. My most egregious example of this for me is that there's a grocery store near me that the Google assistant is incapable of finding because of a few people in my contacts list. Whenever I try to ask it for directions to that store, it picks (at pretty much random) one of three of my contacts instead. This is despite the only common part of said contacts' names and the grocery store is that their names all start with the same letter. Basically, imagine asking for directions to Albertsons, and the assistant giving you directions to Andrew.