5 ms·

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 tr

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.

nirimda 3y ago
One difference I have noticed is that it used to be when I said "five minute timer" it would maybe ten percent of the time hear "five minutes timer" and decide it should search youtube for matching videos. Nowadays, it seems to treat "five minutes timer" and "five minute timer" as equal, but I get more silent misses where it ignores everything I said. On the other hand, I gave up some kinds of requests. For instance, I used to try "start directions home" when I was driving and it would say "here's a route I found, do you want to start (or some such)" and there would be no way to actually start the directions home without breaking the very expensive law against touching your phone while driving. Does that work today? I don't know, because I've mostly been driving with Android Auto in the last few years and my wife's been in the car on the rare occasion I haven't. But it seems like the Assistant team could straightforwardly improve it.
- Doxin 3y ago
  > On the other hand, I gave up some kinds of requests. Those kinds of things seem to work absolutely flawlessly for me lately. I had similarly given up on those requests. Heck I had given up on setting timers since that just plain stopped working. A month ago or so I tried changing navigation by voice while driving and to my surprise it worked fine. Since then I've been picking up my use of the assistant more and have yet to have a miss. My main gripe is the trigger word being kinda iffy at times, but I suspect that's due to me still rocking the original pixel. As I understand it the trigger word stuff runs locally so is dependent on your hardware being good.

nirimda 3y ago

One difference I have noticed is that it used to be when I said "five minute timer" it would maybe ten percent of the time hear "five minutes timer" and decide it should search youtube for matching videos. Nowadays, it seems to treat "five minutes timer" and "five minute timer" as equal, but I get more silent misses where it ignores everything I said. On the other hand, I gave up some kinds of requests. For instance, I used to try "start directions home" when I was driving and it would say "here's a route I found, do you want to start (or some such)" and there would be no way to actually start the directions home without breaking the very expensive law against touching your phone while driving. Does that work today? I don't know, because I've mostly been driving with Android Auto in the last few years and my wife's been in the car on the rare occasion I haven't. But it seems like the Assistant team could straightforwardly improve it.

Doxin 3y ago
> On the other hand, I gave up some kinds of requests. Those kinds of things seem to work absolutely flawlessly for me lately. I had similarly given up on those requests. Heck I had given up on setting timers since that just plain stopped working. A month ago or so I tried changing navigation by voice while driving and to my surprise it worked fine. Since then I've been picking up my use of the assistant more and have yet to have a miss. My main gripe is the trigger word being kinda iffy at times, but I suspect that's due to me still rocking the original pixel. As I understand it the trigger word stuff runs locally so is dependent on your hardware being good.