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"hey siri, when I get home every day, turn on all of the lights, change my focus to personal, and turn on the news" I think the problem with that is that even
by matthewmacleod 4y ago
"hey siri, when I get home every day, turn on all of the lights, change my focus to personal, and turn on the news"
I think the problem with that is that even I, as a human, struggle to know for sure what you want.
You want to turn all the lights on in the house? Does that include the lamps in the bedroom? How about new lights that you add later? Or the ones in the garden? It's full of ambiguity. What device do you want to watch the news on? Or did you mean the radio? Do you want this to apply when you get back at 2am one night, meaning your family gets woken up when you turn on all the lights and start playing the news in their bedrooms?
I think that's probably why voice interfaces aren't likely to work well for anything beyond direct, specific, well-scoped requests: turn on the lights in the bedroom; turn off the heating at home; roll up the blinds; what's the weather like today; what's the remaining range on my car. They really struggle to deal with anything more complex – not so bad in theory, but really incredibly irritating when they make the wrong decision.
If you had some kind of 24-hour live-in assistant (a butler, maybe?), then they probably have the knowledge and intuition to make sensible decisions in response to fairly unstructured requests. But I think we're miles off getting a voice assistant to do it – not because they can't, necessarily, but because if they mess it up at all it's infuriating.
- bombcar 4y agoYou can do some of this with shortcuts, and then use Siri to trigger the shortcut. But that involves thinking; the magic of Jeeves is that he knows what you want even before you do.
- bluGill 4y agoThe problem is there are more different combinations I might want as a shortcut then I have time to program/remember. I can remember something like a dozen commonly used shortcuts. However when 5 years from now I arrive home at 2am (for the first time in several decades, but it will probably happen at some point again in my life) will I remember the correct shortcut - and assuming I do, is it up to date with whatever changes have been made to my house? What about the shortcut for when I need to leave at 3am for some reason. then a different shortcut for when it isn't just me, but my whole family leaving at 3am. An still another for my son having to leave that early. Jeeves can figure it out when I arrive at 2am so I don't need to program it.
- matthewmacleod 4y agoYou've reminded me of some aspects of these platforms that I like in a more general sense – like for example the way the Apple Watch will automatically ring the alarm on my phone if I forget to put my watch on, or if I get up before my alarm goes off the watch will notice and ask if I want to skip the alarm for the day. This stuff genuinely feels almost like magic sometimes – the risk is that when anything like this goes wrong it's awful.
- bombcar 4y agoYeah these are graceful - and the watch will start out very light buzzing and then get louder.