6 ms·

>we now (almost) have the technology to build personal assistants that actually work Siri doesn't need AI to be useful - it really just needs this $2t company

>we now (almost) have the technology to build personal assistants that actually work Siri doesn't need AI to be useful - it really just needs this $2t company to invest in some basic usability around a set of prompts that people could actually use. Yesterday's ridiculous Siri failure: "hey siri, set alert volume to 25%" Siri: "media volume set to 25%" That is not bad AI, that is a total failure of UX and it makes it clear that Apple has simply failed to invest resources into making Siri useful.

mustacheemperor 4y ago
The one that really boggled me recently: >hey siri, play Chet Baker Sings on the Apple TV >playing the best of chet baker sings on Apple TV >Siri, play the album “chet baker sings” on Apple TV >playing the best of chet baker sings on Apple TV Those are not the same album…and only one of them is saved in my library, the one I asked for. It failed repeatedly, too. The only response Siri would produce was to insert two new words to my request and then serve that.
- LazyMans 4y ago
  Years later and my Alexa in my bathroom still only successfully starts NPR when I ask it to maybe 80% of the time. Alexa isn't getting any better at recognizing my voice? At 8am everyday, it hasn't learned I'm likely asking for NPR, not something else? It's not consistent at all. Controlling Hue lights with it is atrocious too. Alexa is purely a dumb voice assistant and there is either a complete lack of investment in it, or that money is invested elsewhere like making Alexa more likely to order too much product off Amazon so someone can point to a chart that shows a bug increased sales.
- dmd 4y ago
  My experience: > hey siri, play the art of fugue by bach on downstairs > now playing Love The Way You Lie featuring Rihanna, by Eminem, on downstairs And like have apple’s ML people just never even heard of Bayes or what? if i have, in the last few days, asked siri to play debussy, ravel, liszt, and chopin, and today I say “play debussy on downstairs” - and i have never, not once, played any kind of rap or hiphop - why would it... “now playing Ain’t No fun - by Snoop Dogg - on downstairs”?
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    For all we know, this part of the algorithm was written up by a software engineer whose PM didn't think they needed to talk to the data scientists because it was just a voice recognition problem and why would you bring in those eggheads who like to talk about uncertainty, they just make things harder.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I really wish I could tell Apple Music: "Unless I explicitly ask for a rap or hiphop song (which, trust me, I almost certainly won't), never ever play one as part of a playlist."
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      The way that ChatGPT works won't help there. If you tell it to write a story about someone who cannot see, then "see" will be pushed higher into its weights and it'll start talking about the stuff the character can see (if you say the character is "blind" then it'll work better). It is a language model that lacks critical reasoning skills.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        In this case, you don't need ML. Apple has a dictionary of music styles and you just need to be able to exclude certain styles.
      - panarky 4y ago
        Have you actually tried this, or are you just assuming that ChatGPT is just a hyped-up autocomplete, simply doing statisitcal next-token prediction with no internal representation of concepts and relationships? Prompt: "Write a three-paragraph story about someone who cannot see." Response: Maria was born without the ability to see. Growing up, she always felt like she was missing out on something that everyone else took for granted. She would hear her friends describe colors and the beauty of nature, and while she could imagine what they were talking about, she knew she could never truly experience it for herself. Despite this, Maria never let her blindness hold her back. She learned to read Braille and used her heightened sense of hearing and touch to navigate the world around her. She even took up piano and became an accomplished musician, playing by ear. One day, Maria met a man named Alex who was fascinated by her ability to navigate the world without sight. He would often accompany her on walks and describe the beauty of the world around them, pointing out flowers and trees and the changing colors of the sky. Maria found herself falling in love with Alex, and although she knew that their lives would be different because of her blindness, she was willing to take the risk. Alex was patient and understanding, and he took the time to learn how to communicate with Maria in a way that she could understand. He even started taking piano lessons so that he could play duets with her. Years went by, and Maria and Alex built a life together filled with love and happiness. While Maria never regained her sight, she realized that she didn't need it to experience the beauty of the world. Through her other senses and the love of those around her, she had everything she needed to live a full and meaningful life.
- cameldrv 4y ago
  Lucky you! Half the time I say in my car "Hey Siri, navigate to XYZ", it says in its long-winded way, "XYZ is 2.5 miles from your house and gets 3.5 stars on yelp. Is that the one you want?" Then I say "yes." Siri responds "Navigating to XYZ." Then Siri then just forgets about it and doesn't do anything.
300bps 4y ago
Agree 100% and Amazon has done a similarly bad job with Alexa. I have five echo devices through my house and have only found about ten uses for them. They’re useful but 1) finding uses for them and 2) twisting your words around to make it understand you is an exercise in frustration. It seems like it would be an easy data mining exercise for these companies: If someone asks for something and stops, don’t flag it. If someone asks for something 3+ times in a row, flag it to figure out why they didn’t get what they wanted the first time. If someone says, “Alexa you’re an idiot” don’t just play a snarky comeback. Flag that for serious review. Then iterate. There seems to be almost no useful iteration on these virtual assistants.
Hyption 4y ago
Have you tried chatgpt? It's tremendously coherent. The chance that chatgpt just hears your example and than does the right thing is nearly a no brainer. It already understood much more complicated prompts from my tests with ease. Siri and other agents struggle tremendously and the implication after such a long time has to be a reflection of either a tremendous Missmanagement or that those classical approaches are just too hard. Or that the chatgpt people are genius. But that would be even worse: it would show how much impact chatgpt and co will have sooner than later.
- klodolph 4y ago
  Coherent is nice, but correct would be better.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    It's mostly correct most of the time. That's pretty good.
    - more_corn 4y ago
      It’s about as trustworthy as the average person. You’d want to verify any fact it fed you. Of course you want to do that with people too. Shouldn’t be too hard to bake in a self check module.
  - Hyption 4y ago
    It's correct often enough already to be useful. And it doesn't need to be more correct to disrupt industries already it just needs to be more correct than humans. The most crazy thing is that it's already so good and coherent that it makes totally sense to train a ml model like chatgpt instead of training humans! Because it scales. We never had this. And.i already mentor a few junior people I don't mind training an ai instead.
    - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
      I struggle to believe we can train a LLM the same was as a junior eng, mostly in that I’ve tried to keep a LLM as a journal of sorts and it forgets things way more than a junior does.
klodolph 4y ago
I don’t think Apple has “simply failed to invest resources into making Siri useful”, but rather, voice assistants pose major UX problems that nobody knows how to solve at scale. We have tons of patterns for CLI and GUI usability. But in both cases, we have a easy enough way for users to discover what is possible—in the CLI, you can present a list of commands or categories for commands. In the GUI, we have menus, dialogs, and windows that let you explore. Voice is a much more difficult problem in the first place. Voice commands are often modeless, discovery is difficult, and commands are given with troublesome natural language patterns which must somehow be adapted to multiple languages. Take a look at all the different voice assistants—Siri, Alexa, and Google. They all kinda suck, despite enormous amounts of money being poured in. From recent news, we know that Alexa managed a loss close to $10 billion in a single year. By all signs, it contains some brilliant engineering, but brilliant engineering doesn’t matter if it doesn’t solve the underlying (difficult) problems well enough. (I don’t think tools like ChatGPT are going to push the needle much here, at least for a couple years, because integration with all the different software systems takes such a massive amount of coordinated work.)
- ghaff 4y ago
  In my experience, voice assistants go through a cycle something like: 1. The novelty of the thing! 2. Start using for some simple stuff like weather, timer, alarm, etc. 3. Try more complicated things like skills, really managing controls/media in the car, reliably playing some album.. and largely give up because it's frustrating. 4. Mostly go back to 2.
- wintermutestwin 4y ago
  >voice assistants pose major UX problems that nobody knows how to solve at scale. My example of a Siri fail is not at all indicative of a "major UX problem. The fact that Siri doesn't understand iOS nomenclature and that iOS doesn't have the proper hooks to do something that a user would obviously want to do, is indicative of a total failure to invest resources in making Siri useful.
mercutio2 4y ago
This (incredibly irritating) behavior isn’t an engineering failure, it’s a specific policy failure. The idea is “we will not give you a way to make our conversional UI incomprehensibly quiet”. It is an especially dumb policy decision on anything that’s not a HomePod, and it’s also dumb to willfully ignore the user’s intent and focus on the one thing the device is willing to do for you regarding volume, rather than explaining “sorry, I’m always going to be loud, my makers are worried you’ll complain I’m inaudible if you try to get me to stop yelling my responses” but it is deliberate.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  So it's a UX failure, as parent wrote.
williamcotton 4y ago
Adding a large language model fine-tuned to translate English commands into a limited set of structured actions for Siri would drastically improve the Siri experience.

mustacheemperor 4y ago

The one that really boggled me recently: >hey siri, play Chet Baker Sings on the Apple TV >playing the best of chet baker sings on Apple TV >Siri, play the album “chet baker sings” on Apple TV >playing the best of chet baker sings on Apple TV Those are not the same album…and only one of them is saved in my library, the one I asked for. It failed repeatedly, too. The only response Siri would produce was to insert two new words to my request and then serve that.

LazyMans 4y ago
Years later and my Alexa in my bathroom still only successfully starts NPR when I ask it to maybe 80% of the time. Alexa isn't getting any better at recognizing my voice? At 8am everyday, it hasn't learned I'm likely asking for NPR, not something else? It's not consistent at all. Controlling Hue lights with it is atrocious too. Alexa is purely a dumb voice assistant and there is either a complete lack of investment in it, or that money is invested elsewhere like making Alexa more likely to order too much product off Amazon so someone can point to a chart that shows a bug increased sales.
dmd 4y ago
My experience: > hey siri, play the art of fugue by bach on downstairs > now playing Love The Way You Lie featuring Rihanna, by Eminem, on downstairs And like have apple’s ML people just never even heard of Bayes or what? if i have, in the last few days, asked siri to play debussy, ravel, liszt, and chopin, and today I say “play debussy on downstairs” - and i have never, not once, played any kind of rap or hiphop - why would it... “now playing Ain’t No fun - by Snoop Dogg - on downstairs”?
- nerdponx 4y ago
  For all we know, this part of the algorithm was written up by a software engineer whose PM didn't think they needed to talk to the data scientists because it was just a voice recognition problem and why would you bring in those eggheads who like to talk about uncertainty, they just make things harder.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I really wish I could tell Apple Music: "Unless I explicitly ask for a rap or hiphop song (which, trust me, I almost certainly won't), never ever play one as part of a playlist."
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    The way that ChatGPT works won't help there. If you tell it to write a story about someone who cannot see, then "see" will be pushed higher into its weights and it'll start talking about the stuff the character can see (if you say the character is "blind" then it'll work better). It is a language model that lacks critical reasoning skills.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      In this case, you don't need ML. Apple has a dictionary of music styles and you just need to be able to exclude certain styles.
    - panarky 4y ago
      Have you actually tried this, or are you just assuming that ChatGPT is just a hyped-up autocomplete, simply doing statisitcal next-token prediction with no internal representation of concepts and relationships? Prompt: "Write a three-paragraph story about someone who cannot see." Response: Maria was born without the ability to see. Growing up, she always felt like she was missing out on something that everyone else took for granted. She would hear her friends describe colors and the beauty of nature, and while she could imagine what they were talking about, she knew she could never truly experience it for herself. Despite this, Maria never let her blindness hold her back. She learned to read Braille and used her heightened sense of hearing and touch to navigate the world around her. She even took up piano and became an accomplished musician, playing by ear. One day, Maria met a man named Alex who was fascinated by her ability to navigate the world without sight. He would often accompany her on walks and describe the beauty of the world around them, pointing out flowers and trees and the changing colors of the sky. Maria found herself falling in love with Alex, and although she knew that their lives would be different because of her blindness, she was willing to take the risk. Alex was patient and understanding, and he took the time to learn how to communicate with Maria in a way that she could understand. He even started taking piano lessons so that he could play duets with her. Years went by, and Maria and Alex built a life together filled with love and happiness. While Maria never regained her sight, she realized that she didn't need it to experience the beauty of the world. Through her other senses and the love of those around her, she had everything she needed to live a full and meaningful life.
cameldrv 4y ago
Lucky you! Half the time I say in my car "Hey Siri, navigate to XYZ", it says in its long-winded way, "XYZ is 2.5 miles from your house and gets 3.5 stars on yelp. Is that the one you want?" Then I say "yes." Siri responds "Navigating to XYZ." Then Siri then just forgets about it and doesn't do anything.

300bps 4y ago

Agree 100% and Amazon has done a similarly bad job with Alexa. I have five echo devices through my house and have only found about ten uses for them. They’re useful but 1) finding uses for them and 2) twisting your words around to make it understand you is an exercise in frustration. It seems like it would be an easy data mining exercise for these companies: If someone asks for something and stops, don’t flag it. If someone asks for something 3+ times in a row, flag it to figure out why they didn’t get what they wanted the first time. If someone says, “Alexa you’re an idiot” don’t just play a snarky comeback. Flag that for serious review. Then iterate. There seems to be almost no useful iteration on these virtual assistants.

Hyption 4y ago

Have you tried chatgpt? It's tremendously coherent. The chance that chatgpt just hears your example and than does the right thing is nearly a no brainer. It already understood much more complicated prompts from my tests with ease. Siri and other agents struggle tremendously and the implication after such a long time has to be a reflection of either a tremendous Missmanagement or that those classical approaches are just too hard. Or that the chatgpt people are genius. But that would be even worse: it would show how much impact chatgpt and co will have sooner than later.

klodolph 4y ago
Coherent is nice, but correct would be better.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  It's mostly correct most of the time. That's pretty good.
  - more_corn 4y ago
    It’s about as trustworthy as the average person. You’d want to verify any fact it fed you. Of course you want to do that with people too. Shouldn’t be too hard to bake in a self check module.
- Hyption 4y ago
  It's correct often enough already to be useful. And it doesn't need to be more correct to disrupt industries already it just needs to be more correct than humans. The most crazy thing is that it's already so good and coherent that it makes totally sense to train a ml model like chatgpt instead of training humans! Because it scales. We never had this. And.i already mentor a few junior people I don't mind training an ai instead.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    I struggle to believe we can train a LLM the same was as a junior eng, mostly in that I’ve tried to keep a LLM as a journal of sorts and it forgets things way more than a junior does.

klodolph 4y ago

I don’t think Apple has “simply failed to invest resources into making Siri useful”, but rather, voice assistants pose major UX problems that nobody knows how to solve at scale. We have tons of patterns for CLI and GUI usability. But in both cases, we have a easy enough way for users to discover what is possible—in the CLI, you can present a list of commands or categories for commands. In the GUI, we have menus, dialogs, and windows that let you explore. Voice is a much more difficult problem in the first place. Voice commands are often modeless, discovery is difficult, and commands are given with troublesome natural language patterns which must somehow be adapted to multiple languages. Take a look at all the different voice assistants—Siri, Alexa, and Google. They all kinda suck, despite enormous amounts of money being poured in. From recent news, we know that Alexa managed a loss close to $10 billion in a single year. By all signs, it contains some brilliant engineering, but brilliant engineering doesn’t matter if it doesn’t solve the underlying (difficult) problems well enough. (I don’t think tools like ChatGPT are going to push the needle much here, at least for a couple years, because integration with all the different software systems takes such a massive amount of coordinated work.)

ghaff 4y ago
In my experience, voice assistants go through a cycle something like: 1. The novelty of the thing! 2. Start using for some simple stuff like weather, timer, alarm, etc. 3. Try more complicated things like skills, really managing controls/media in the car, reliably playing some album.. and largely give up because it's frustrating. 4. Mostly go back to 2.
wintermutestwin 4y ago
>voice assistants pose major UX problems that nobody knows how to solve at scale. My example of a Siri fail is not at all indicative of a "major UX problem. The fact that Siri doesn't understand iOS nomenclature and that iOS doesn't have the proper hooks to do something that a user would obviously want to do, is indicative of a total failure to invest resources in making Siri useful.

mercutio2 4y ago

This (incredibly irritating) behavior isn’t an engineering failure, it’s a specific policy failure. The idea is “we will not give you a way to make our conversional UI incomprehensibly quiet”. It is an especially dumb policy decision on anything that’s not a HomePod, and it’s also dumb to willfully ignore the user’s intent and focus on the one thing the device is willing to do for you regarding volume, rather than explaining “sorry, I’m always going to be loud, my makers are worried you’ll complain I’m inaudible if you try to get me to stop yelling my responses” but it is deliberate.

hgsgm 4y ago
So it's a UX failure, as parent wrote.

williamcotton 4y ago

Adding a large language model fine-tuned to translate English commands into a limited set of structured actions for Siri would drastically improve the Siri experience.