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I don't use any feature of Google Assistant that wasn't present in the original Android voice search feature over a decade ago. And the few features I do use ha

I don't use any feature of Google Assistant that wasn't present in the original Android voice search feature over a decade ago. And the few features I do use haven't improved in any way that I've noticed. In fact I feel like reliability has regressed. Google could have fired almost the whole team years ago and my user experience would not be different today. I consider voice assistants to be a failed experiment. It's clear that they were doomed to fail without the true ability to understand natural language and perform common sense reasoning that is only now starting to become a possibility with large language models.

aspectmin 3y ago
I would counter that voice assistants are not a failed experiment. I would suggest that Amazon and Google’s execution of said experiments have failed. I am extremely excited about the potential of projects like the Rabbit R1 and Humane.
- modeless 3y ago
  I agree, I just think these new projects based on LLMs should be considered a different category, AI agents or something. The traditional grammar-based voice assistant architecture used by Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, Bixby, etc is an abject failure, and not for lack of trying.
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
    I think many parts of the architecture can be reused - in Alexa terms, all of the “skills” that integrate the assistant with various other services. IMO one of the main problems with assistants is that I don’t know what skills are available or how to invoke them. It’s like I’m a wizard who has to memorize all the spells I could be casting. It never happens because I don’t care enough. I think LLM’s could potentially help my making it easier to discover and invoke those skills.
    - modeless 3y ago
      "Skills" will be obsolete very soon. AI agents will use the same software tools and services that humans do. They won't need special separate AI-only interfaces. I'm not excited about the Rabbit R1 as a hardware device but their software vision is exactly right and there are new startups coming out of stealth seemingly every day now attacking this problem.
      - vineyardmike 3y ago
        Skills are just APIs that conform to a similar look. We'll definitely continue to have AI-only or developed-for-AI APIs for future "agents" to act against. They probably won't spend much effort formatting text to sound good to a person, but the infrastructure is here.
        modeless 3y ago
        I disagree. These special APIs will not have the breadth of capabilities that the human UI does, so AIs will use the human UIs out of necessity. But I think in the long term we will eventually see a simplification of UIs. As it becomes less common for humans to actually use them, they will no longer need fancy animations or dark mode or client-side validation or pretty styling. In the extreme, a return to plain HTML forms that a human can use in a pinch but are mostly used by AI agents. At that point I guess you're blurring the lines between UI and API.
        usrusr 3y ago
        Isn't it the exact opposite? Interfaces we use every day can be dead simple, all they need is that they don't change behind our back. The accelerator pedal does not come with a footover pop-up "keep pressed to make car go". Interfaces we use once in a leap year on the other hand, that's where we need all the hand-holding we can get.
    - 7thaccount 3y ago
      This "spells" is such a great way to explain how it feels to me to use these assistants. I'll play with one if I'm at a friend's house, but honestly can't see the appeal. Telling Google to change the color of the lighting or brightness just seems like something that is mostly a gimmick unless you're maybe disabled and then it may be a big quality of life improvement. The other stuff doubly so. With ChatGPT I can see the appeal for certain tasks like having it create a custom text adventure for you, but I can't see it being too useful in my day to day life yet.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    If the Alexa/Echo-category of devices are meant to be some widely flexible and pervasively useful device from Star Trek, they're a failure. If they're meant to be a usable $30 kitchen timer and music player, they're pretty great.
    - pseudosavant 3y ago
      They do succeed in that way many times a day every day in my house
    - mlyle 3y ago
      Yup, as far as something that can turn on a light, run a timer, convert some units, tell me the weather, and have an -okay- shot at some categories of random questions instead of me getting out my computer-- the google assistant is just fine.
    - a_gnostic 3y ago
      As '80s telescreens they were fantastic.
    - modeless 3y ago
      Google Voice Search used internal codename "Majel" in reference to Majel Barrett, who played the voice of the Star Trek computer. That was explicitly the ambition. It just didn't work out.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        OK. I believe you. They accidentally created something else that was very useful but different from what they set out to do. Is that a story of failure or of success? Starbucks launched to sell beans and espresso machines. YouTube launched as a video dating site. Are they also failures?
        modeless 3y ago
        I guess where we disagree is "very useful". If Google Assistant stopped working tomorrow I would hardly care at all. There are a couple of scenarios where it's slightly more convenient than using my phone (assuming I don't encounter one of its many failure modes) and that's about it. I'm sure the hands free aspect is important for certain people in certain situations but I think the vast majority of people just don't see a lot of value from it.
- rwc 3y ago
  Things don't seem to be going well at Humane, either: https://www.fastcompany.com/91008117/ai-pin-humane-layoffs https://www.fastcompany.com/91008117/ai-pin-humane-layoffs
  - chucksmash 3y ago
    No horse in the race, but the layoff is only ten people from a 250 person company that is still hiring. I'm a little surprised it even merited an article.
- ramraj07 3y ago
  Not sure if any comment that holds Humane in high regard can be taken seriously though.
  - aspectmin 3y ago
    It’s interesting. I had not heard the latest. Their initial videos looked promising. I ordered a rabbit r1. I can see it’s missing some key functionality (Bluetooth for headphones so everyone doesn’t have to hear?) But… I think it’s an example of a first, promising, step to the era of real voice assistants/agents.
    - CWIZO 3y ago
      > Bluetooth for headphones so everyone doesn’t have to hear? This is a critical missing feature. I would never ever use this unless it's in my ear alone. And I hope it doesn't become socially acceptable to be carrying these around forcing everyone else to listen to whatever this device has to tell the user. There is already far too many noise and inconsiderate people in this world.
      - usrusr 3y ago
        But how is the input side sufficiently compatible with any state other than being alone? Voice surely does not qualify? Even gesture control would be a tough sell, and even that only if it's not "AR, where you push buttons projected across your field of vision" but "AR, where you can do the equivalent of gamepad buttons with hand movement anywhere the device can see the hand". Voice output (earbuds) would be far too slow for that kind of interaction, because you can't skim a list. Compared to the strictly sequential nature of audio, screens are the equivalent of embarrassingly parallel. By the way, that slowness of voice output vs screen is also what I consider the true motivation companies had for creating those essentially free voice assistants: searching for product/service on a screen, even if it's just a small handheld screen, makes you pick from a list. With voice in the other hand, going through the list is so slow and cumbersome that the chances for just picking the first, "I'm feeling lucky", are much, much bigger. The value of placement (bought directly or bought indirectly, "this must be very relevant because we know how much they can spend on our other ad services") is just so much bigger with voice. Chances are people are less likely to listen to the second hit on voice than to go to the second page on screen.
dzader 3y ago
[dead]
razodactyl 3y ago
I think your last paragraph contrasts and slightly contradicts itself but I agree with the failure part. If we consider a real-life PA performing tasks on our phone for us the question can be asked if it makes much sense or if it would be an interesting novelty. Basic functionality has always been the key winner with this tech. Calling, setting reminders etc. nothing too complex.
- modeless 3y ago
  I just think the new LLM-based agents are in a different category. I don't see them as a continuation of the Siri/Alexa/etc lineage. I do think a human personal assistant who had unlimited access to my data and could perform any task my phone or desktop could do would be exceedingly useful, even if the only interaction possibility was voice. And I think that AI agents will approach that level of usefulness within a decade or two.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
I mean, without those rudimentary building blocks they wouldn't have a lot of data and talent ready to investigate LLM's (and ofc, lots of polish on the NLP framework. Not as flashy, but very important for the UX). I don't see it as a failed experiment so much as a raw prototype if we believe LLM's can realize the true potential. Heck, for all we know, we were actually just training the model for this past decade.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  What are you talking about? What "rudimentary building blocks" came as a result of voice assistants? They have nothing at all in common with LLMs. Your post is pure non-sequitur.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    A bulk of data that the product trained upon in order to execute a task based upon promoting instead of a rigid command? They only have nothing in common if you think of a Voice assistant as no smarter than those auto prompt customer support lines. Clearly Siri/Cortana/Google assistant had sole basic context mapping.
joshspankit 3y ago
I think that voice assistants could have been much more usable this whole time if they had avoided getting mired in pushing products/music and instead stayed focused on doing a few things well.
- ertian 3y ago
  Yes, but there's no money in just being usable.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I pretty strongly disagree. First, from an accuracy perspective, Google Assistant has gotten much better. It almost never misunderstands me, even when I'm mumbling and I'm surprised it can understand me. I do agree that the set of actions I use Google assistant for is pretty static and are the same ones everyone else uses it for: What's the weather? Set my alarm? What's the first item on my calendar? Play XYZ on Spotify... But I don't see this at all as a "failed experiment". On the contrary, I see it as a successful experiment, at least from a human utility perspective: I ask it to do a concrete task, and it does it. The reason it's failed from a larger business perspective is because the format is less amenable to big tech sucking any more of our money or mind out of it. But I say Amen to that! Wherever I go I feel like tech interfaces get relentlessly shittier as they just try to hook us into more mindless scrolling (this HN post on the topic is one of my favorites of all time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507) That's just fundamentally harder to do with a voice assistant because nobody has yet figured out how to plug in voice "algorithms" in a way that would make the device control you like they do with YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, etc. If anything, I think the rest of tech that gets you to do things you really don't want to do should be the thing that's considered a "failed experiment".
- modeless 3y ago
  I agree that its transcribing accuracy is better (largely thanks to general progress in neural nets rather than anything Assistant did as a product). However transcription accuracy was already surprisingly good many years ago, and in my experience any improvement since has been swamped by actually reduced reliability in understanding intent and performing actions. Ultimately it doesn't matter if it misheard me or got the words correct but misinterpreted the meaning or simply failed due to internal errors. The user experience is similarly bad in all these cases. Also I don't feel that hotword detection has improved much, and hotword issues continue to be a big pain point for me. I'm sure the team has a dashboard somewhere that shows consistent gains in their hotword metrics, but as a user I don't feel it at all. The reason I say it's a failed experiment is that the original ambition was to build the Star Trek computer (explicitly, in Google's case: the project was code named "Majel"), and it hasn't worked out. There may be a couple of features that are somewhat convenient (which, again, largely worked fine already a decade ago) but they don't come close to justifying the level of resources spent on these projects over the last decade.
Maro 3y ago
I have multiple Google Home speaker devices at home. My experience that about 1/3 of the time, even in silence, it does not understand simple commands like "Stop" or "Pause". Sometimes I say "Stop" and it interprets this as "Stocks" and starts reading out stock prices. The fact that it only works 2/3 of the time makes it a frustrating UX, I hate trying to "use" it. (First world problems..)
- phatskat 3y ago
  Yep, I’ve got a few speakers and it feels like a crapshoot. I pretty much only say “lights on/off”, “play rain sounds”, and “stop”. But the goog hears _something_ that translates to “playing lights53 on Spotify”, or “here’s what’s playing near you”. Usually in quiet environments too when it mishears me - oddly good at parsing stuff in noisy environments or low volume, if I’m talking (masculine voice) but my roommate (more femme) usually doesn’t get heard at all.
xnx 3y ago
Weird to call Google Assistant failed when it's about to get vastly more capable by being wired to Bard/Gemini. Already, I want to talk to Google Assistant like it's an LLM, but it's not there yet.
- dekhn 3y ago
  LLMs at Google aren't going to augment Assistant, they're going to replace it. With something that isn't an assistant, and doesn't do anything useful.

aspectmin 3y ago

I would counter that voice assistants are not a failed experiment. I would suggest that Amazon and Google’s execution of said experiments have failed. I am extremely excited about the potential of projects like the Rabbit R1 and Humane.

modeless 3y ago
I agree, I just think these new projects based on LLMs should be considered a different category, AI agents or something. The traditional grammar-based voice assistant architecture used by Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, Bixby, etc is an abject failure, and not for lack of trying.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
  I think many parts of the architecture can be reused - in Alexa terms, all of the “skills” that integrate the assistant with various other services. IMO one of the main problems with assistants is that I don’t know what skills are available or how to invoke them. It’s like I’m a wizard who has to memorize all the spells I could be casting. It never happens because I don’t care enough. I think LLM’s could potentially help my making it easier to discover and invoke those skills.
  - modeless 3y ago
    "Skills" will be obsolete very soon. AI agents will use the same software tools and services that humans do. They won't need special separate AI-only interfaces. I'm not excited about the Rabbit R1 as a hardware device but their software vision is exactly right and there are new startups coming out of stealth seemingly every day now attacking this problem.
    - vineyardmike 3y ago
      Skills are just APIs that conform to a similar look. We'll definitely continue to have AI-only or developed-for-AI APIs for future "agents" to act against. They probably won't spend much effort formatting text to sound good to a person, but the infrastructure is here.
      - modeless 3y ago
        I disagree. These special APIs will not have the breadth of capabilities that the human UI does, so AIs will use the human UIs out of necessity. But I think in the long term we will eventually see a simplification of UIs. As it becomes less common for humans to actually use them, they will no longer need fancy animations or dark mode or client-side validation or pretty styling. In the extreme, a return to plain HTML forms that a human can use in a pinch but are mostly used by AI agents. At that point I guess you're blurring the lines between UI and API.
        usrusr 3y ago
        Isn't it the exact opposite? Interfaces we use every day can be dead simple, all they need is that they don't change behind our back. The accelerator pedal does not come with a footover pop-up "keep pressed to make car go". Interfaces we use once in a leap year on the other hand, that's where we need all the hand-holding we can get.
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    This "spells" is such a great way to explain how it feels to me to use these assistants. I'll play with one if I'm at a friend's house, but honestly can't see the appeal. Telling Google to change the color of the lighting or brightness just seems like something that is mostly a gimmick unless you're maybe disabled and then it may be a big quality of life improvement. The other stuff doubly so. With ChatGPT I can see the appeal for certain tasks like having it create a custom text adventure for you, but I can't see it being too useful in my day to day life yet.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  If the Alexa/Echo-category of devices are meant to be some widely flexible and pervasively useful device from Star Trek, they're a failure. If they're meant to be a usable $30 kitchen timer and music player, they're pretty great.
  - pseudosavant 3y ago
    They do succeed in that way many times a day every day in my house
  - mlyle 3y ago
    Yup, as far as something that can turn on a light, run a timer, convert some units, tell me the weather, and have an -okay- shot at some categories of random questions instead of me getting out my computer-- the google assistant is just fine.
  - a_gnostic 3y ago
    As '80s telescreens they were fantastic.
  - modeless 3y ago
    Google Voice Search used internal codename "Majel" in reference to Majel Barrett, who played the voice of the Star Trek computer. That was explicitly the ambition. It just didn't work out.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      OK. I believe you. They accidentally created something else that was very useful but different from what they set out to do. Is that a story of failure or of success? Starbucks launched to sell beans and espresso machines. YouTube launched as a video dating site. Are they also failures?
      - modeless 3y ago
        I guess where we disagree is "very useful". If Google Assistant stopped working tomorrow I would hardly care at all. There are a couple of scenarios where it's slightly more convenient than using my phone (assuming I don't encounter one of its many failure modes) and that's about it. I'm sure the hands free aspect is important for certain people in certain situations but I think the vast majority of people just don't see a lot of value from it.
rwc 3y ago
Things don't seem to be going well at Humane, either: https://www.fastcompany.com/91008117/ai-pin-humane-layoffs https://www.fastcompany.com/91008117/ai-pin-humane-layoffs
- chucksmash 3y ago
  No horse in the race, but the layoff is only ten people from a 250 person company that is still hiring. I'm a little surprised it even merited an article.
ramraj07 3y ago
Not sure if any comment that holds Humane in high regard can be taken seriously though.
- aspectmin 3y ago
  It’s interesting. I had not heard the latest. Their initial videos looked promising. I ordered a rabbit r1. I can see it’s missing some key functionality (Bluetooth for headphones so everyone doesn’t have to hear?) But… I think it’s an example of a first, promising, step to the era of real voice assistants/agents.
  - CWIZO 3y ago
    > Bluetooth for headphones so everyone doesn’t have to hear? This is a critical missing feature. I would never ever use this unless it's in my ear alone. And I hope it doesn't become socially acceptable to be carrying these around forcing everyone else to listen to whatever this device has to tell the user. There is already far too many noise and inconsiderate people in this world.
    - usrusr 3y ago
      But how is the input side sufficiently compatible with any state other than being alone? Voice surely does not qualify? Even gesture control would be a tough sell, and even that only if it's not "AR, where you push buttons projected across your field of vision" but "AR, where you can do the equivalent of gamepad buttons with hand movement anywhere the device can see the hand". Voice output (earbuds) would be far too slow for that kind of interaction, because you can't skim a list. Compared to the strictly sequential nature of audio, screens are the equivalent of embarrassingly parallel. By the way, that slowness of voice output vs screen is also what I consider the true motivation companies had for creating those essentially free voice assistants: searching for product/service on a screen, even if it's just a small handheld screen, makes you pick from a list. With voice in the other hand, going through the list is so slow and cumbersome that the chances for just picking the first, "I'm feeling lucky", are much, much bigger. The value of placement (bought directly or bought indirectly, "this must be very relevant because we know how much they can spend on our other ad services") is just so much bigger with voice. Chances are people are less likely to listen to the second hit on voice than to go to the second page on screen.

dzader 3y ago

[dead]

razodactyl 3y ago

I think your last paragraph contrasts and slightly contradicts itself but I agree with the failure part. If we consider a real-life PA performing tasks on our phone for us the question can be asked if it makes much sense or if it would be an interesting novelty. Basic functionality has always been the key winner with this tech. Calling, setting reminders etc. nothing too complex.

modeless 3y ago
I just think the new LLM-based agents are in a different category. I don't see them as a continuation of the Siri/Alexa/etc lineage. I do think a human personal assistant who had unlimited access to my data and could perform any task my phone or desktop could do would be exceedingly useful, even if the only interaction possibility was voice. And I think that AI agents will approach that level of usefulness within a decade or two.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

I mean, without those rudimentary building blocks they wouldn't have a lot of data and talent ready to investigate LLM's (and ofc, lots of polish on the NLP framework. Not as flashy, but very important for the UX). I don't see it as a failed experiment so much as a raw prototype if we believe LLM's can realize the true potential. Heck, for all we know, we were actually just training the model for this past decade.

mvdtnz 3y ago
What are you talking about? What "rudimentary building blocks" came as a result of voice assistants? They have nothing at all in common with LLMs. Your post is pure non-sequitur.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  A bulk of data that the product trained upon in order to execute a task based upon promoting instead of a rigid command? They only have nothing in common if you think of a Voice assistant as no smarter than those auto prompt customer support lines. Clearly Siri/Cortana/Google assistant had sole basic context mapping.

joshspankit 3y ago

I think that voice assistants could have been much more usable this whole time if they had avoided getting mired in pushing products/music and instead stayed focused on doing a few things well.

ertian 3y ago
Yes, but there's no money in just being usable.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

I pretty strongly disagree. First, from an accuracy perspective, Google Assistant has gotten much better. It almost never misunderstands me, even when I'm mumbling and I'm surprised it can understand me. I do agree that the set of actions I use Google assistant for is pretty static and are the same ones everyone else uses it for: What's the weather? Set my alarm? What's the first item on my calendar? Play XYZ on Spotify... But I don't see this at all as a "failed experiment". On the contrary, I see it as a successful experiment, at least from a human utility perspective: I ask it to do a concrete task, and it does it. The reason it's failed from a larger business perspective is because the format is less amenable to big tech sucking any more of our money or mind out of it. But I say Amen to that! Wherever I go I feel like tech interfaces get relentlessly shittier as they just try to hook us into more mindless scrolling (this HN post on the topic is one of my favorites of all time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507) That's just fundamentally harder to do with a voice assistant because nobody has yet figured out how to plug in voice "algorithms" in a way that would make the device control you like they do with YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, etc. If anything, I think the rest of tech that gets you to do things you really don't want to do should be the thing that's considered a "failed experiment".

modeless 3y ago
I agree that its transcribing accuracy is better (largely thanks to general progress in neural nets rather than anything Assistant did as a product). However transcription accuracy was already surprisingly good many years ago, and in my experience any improvement since has been swamped by actually reduced reliability in understanding intent and performing actions. Ultimately it doesn't matter if it misheard me or got the words correct but misinterpreted the meaning or simply failed due to internal errors. The user experience is similarly bad in all these cases. Also I don't feel that hotword detection has improved much, and hotword issues continue to be a big pain point for me. I'm sure the team has a dashboard somewhere that shows consistent gains in their hotword metrics, but as a user I don't feel it at all. The reason I say it's a failed experiment is that the original ambition was to build the Star Trek computer (explicitly, in Google's case: the project was code named "Majel"), and it hasn't worked out. There may be a couple of features that are somewhat convenient (which, again, largely worked fine already a decade ago) but they don't come close to justifying the level of resources spent on these projects over the last decade.

Maro 3y ago

I have multiple Google Home speaker devices at home. My experience that about 1/3 of the time, even in silence, it does not understand simple commands like "Stop" or "Pause". Sometimes I say "Stop" and it interprets this as "Stocks" and starts reading out stock prices. The fact that it only works 2/3 of the time makes it a frustrating UX, I hate trying to "use" it. (First world problems..)

phatskat 3y ago
Yep, I’ve got a few speakers and it feels like a crapshoot. I pretty much only say “lights on/off”, “play rain sounds”, and “stop”. But the goog hears _something_ that translates to “playing lights53 on Spotify”, or “here’s what’s playing near you”. Usually in quiet environments too when it mishears me - oddly good at parsing stuff in noisy environments or low volume, if I’m talking (masculine voice) but my roommate (more femme) usually doesn’t get heard at all.

xnx 3y ago

Weird to call Google Assistant failed when it's about to get vastly more capable by being wired to Bard/Gemini. Already, I want to talk to Google Assistant like it's an LLM, but it's not there yet.

dekhn 3y ago
LLMs at Google aren't going to augment Assistant, they're going to replace it. With something that isn't an assistant, and doesn't do anything useful.