17 ms·

To me this highlights the core failure with all these voice-driven UIs: you have absolutely no idea what is possible and what isn't. Discoverability is zero, wh

To me this highlights the core failure with all these voice-driven UIs: you have absolutely no idea what is possible and what isn't. Discoverability is zero, which makes big changes like this even more disruptive. I've already decided that I'm done with Google's smart assistant stuff in any case. I have a Google Home with a screen in my kitchen and the most-used feature (aside from just existing as a photo frame) was an integration with a really useful shopping list app called AnyList. It certainly wasn't complex, we'd say "Hey Google, add <x> to the shopping list" and it would do it. But it was very useful: I'd have something in my hands I just pulled from the fridge (e.g. milk) and be able to add it to the list without interrupting what I'm doing. If it had to wait until I was done for me to pull out my phone I'd inevitably forget. Then one day Google decided to disable that integration. Now the only shopping list you can add to is one Google provides (which naturally has way fewer features than AnyList). They've never provided even the remotest defense for why they've removed it, it's very obviously to lock us into the Google ecosystem. So our Google Home is now a glorified photo frame that plays music from time to time (and even then prioritizes cover versions and YouTube videos over actual songs, presumably because $$$)

paradox460 3y ago
The removal of the AnyList integration drove us to get an Alexa assistant device in the kitchen. It still works there Never thought amazon would have the better assistant ecosystem. Google already has my email and calendar and other stuff, Amazon I have to auth into them like a third party. But it's become true
- afavour 3y ago
  I've been meaning to get around to trying an Apple HomePod Mini, the AnyList integration on my iPhone works okay (thought as an infuriating two-step process, "Hey Siri, add to shopping list" ... "milk") so hopefully it would be replicable on the pod, too. Seems like the least worst option.
  - paradox460 3y ago
    I've been playing with homeassistant voice integration and it's pretty darn good There are some gpt and llama experiments you can run there, but it's finally getting to the point where a local assistant you host yourself might be viable soon Getting audio into it and having a little speaker so it can talk back is both the easiest and the hardest part. I need to play around more with some esp32s and microphone modules
  - speg 3y ago
    I do this on my HomePod mini all the time. Take last apple out of fridge? “Siri, add apples to my grocery list.” Boom, done. Synced with my wife too. This is using the Apple Reminders though, as it seems to have less friction than third party apps…
pflenker 3y ago
On top of what you mentioned in your first sentence, any ideas to improve discoverability are horrible. I hate it when Alexa does not play my podcast right away but explains to me how I can change episodes. I despise Alexa for telling me that I have some notification before starting my timer. And so on - any voice only attempt to explain me something without me asking for it means adding a lot of friction between me and my goal.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  The issue is that everyone removed hierarchical menus and replaced them with... nothing. There is no command ontology anymore. Consequently, discovering commands in-app is UX anathema. "Use the internet, buddy. One of our customers probably documented how-to somewhere on it."
  - Loughla 3y ago
    Seriously though. The development of every company to just trash faq's or an "assistant" or third party forums is awful. Trying to get help with technology is almost always infuriating now. I recently had to contact windows help, and they were useless. The windows forum points to a third party software that I am convinced is malware. And while I'm ranting, why can't the download folders in windows be set to group by "none" and sort by "name" by default? Why are both "most recently edited" by default? AND WHY CAN'T I CHANGE IT MICROSOFT?
    - adjagu 3y ago
      Maybe WinSetView [0] and the options [1] it provides might be of use to you? It was able to resolve the issues I was facing so hopefully it can work for you as well. [0]: https://github.com/LesFerch/WinSetView https://github.com/LesFerch/WinSetView [1]: https://github.com/LesFerch/WinSetView/blob/main/README-more.md https://github.com/LesFerch/WinSetView/blob/main/README-more...
  - havercosine 3y ago
    Spot on! Lot of voice assistants have been following "if we could" line instead of "if we should line". For many straightforward applications, clicking through well defined interface can be the least error prone way to get the job done.
genman 3y ago
This looks like an anti competitive action that should be investigated.
- lxgr 3y ago
  I think Google has actually removed all third-party integrations for Assistant a while ago: https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset In other words, they have just closed down that entire ecosystem. I don't think there's an antitrust angle here: Forcing e.g. Apple to allow third-party apps or app stores seems within reach (at least in the EU); this would be more like forcing Apple to enable apps in a world where they don't even exist (anymore).
  - 6figurelenins 3y ago
    "If there is no banner, your Actions project is not a Conversational Action and won’t be affected." Here, "conversational" means your voice command should prompt the app to ask you a question, driving a state machine. (Set a reminder. When do you want to be reminded?) I haven't tried to use it, but the docs indicate CRUD-over-voice ("built-in intents") is unaffected. https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset#what_will_happen_to_non-conversational_action_development_paths https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset#what_will_... https://developer.android.com/reference/app-actions/built-in-intents/common/create-thing https://developer.android.com/reference/app-actions/built-in...
    - lxgr 3y ago
      Aren’t these only available on Android, though (i.e. not on Home speakers)?
1234letshaveatw 3y ago
you can tell someone lives in California when the most-used assistant feature isn't asking about the weather
- afavour 3y ago
  Quite the opposite. I bike the kids to school every morning. The weather is too important to be summed up by a voice summary, I need the hour by hour details.
  - danielbln 3y ago
    I can ask Alexa e.g. "what's the weather at 9am", that doesn't work with Google Assistant?
    - riversflow 3y ago
      Not OP, but I want to see an hour by hour forecast for the day. If there is precip, I want to see an animated active radar view, with forecast frames. “What’s the weather @ time” is inadequate. I live in California(albeit not on the coast or in the valley).
    - achates 3y ago
      "The weather in Nijmegen is..."
      - esafak 3y ago
        Also fails when you live in a town that has homonyms, so it can fail even when it correctly hears the word. Wrong country, that's all!
      - aworks 3y ago
        I tried this and Alexa replied: The temperature in Nyagen, Russia is current -31 degrees... I'm an American but I've been to Nijmegen so I think my pronunciation was ok.
    - 3y ago
pkulak 3y ago
I still have a Google Home in the kitchen, but what I really want it to display is data from my weather station, transit info, the time, etc. I can't control that damn thing at all. I've got a TidByt coming today, which I have high hopes for!
- spankalee 3y ago
  I haven't used it myself, but Home Assistant can cast to a Google Home Hub, so afaiu, you can set up a whole dashboard of widgets and controls and use it from a stock Home Hub.
  - SparkyMcUnicorn 3y ago
    And touch interface works on the casted lovelace dashboards too! Completely opens up these displays to be a virtually unrestricted canvas for doing or displaying anything you want.
  - rohansingh 3y ago
    I'm going to have to try that out, my whole apartment is mostly Google Home-based. That said, we are building a Home Assistant integration at Tidbyt as well.
    - pkulak 3y ago
      Nice! What I really want, though, is a local API! I can use a starlark script to grab entity states from my local Home Assistant super easy... but then I have to cUrl them up to a Tidbyt server somewhere, only to have it sent right back into my house. Seems kinda silly, and will break anytime my internet goes out.
  - jfim 3y ago
    Are you referring to casting a URL to open a browser on the home hub? I tried that in the past but it was kinda janky. It's definitely possible with something like https://demille.github.io/url-cast-receiver/ https://demille.github.io/url-cast-receiver/ though
- 3y ago
esafak 3y ago
It's not just voice, but conversational interfaces in general that have this discoverability problem. That means chatGPT. I'm glad people are discovering it, if you excuse the pun. CUIs are not a panacea, not a replacement for conventional UIs.
- gr__or 3y ago
  I think there's a line worth drawing here: Pre-LLM voice interfaces required you to guess the command(s) the designer of the thinking were having in mind for the action you want to perform. With LLMs you can be 10ft into human-level vaguery and metaphorism and your intent might still survive. So the difference wrt discovery is that you only have to gesture at what you wanna do and, if a matching action exists, there is a chance it will be understood. I'd wager we'll see a renaissance of voice assistants with LLMs, especially once the good-enough ones can run on device.
  - esafak 3y ago
    When you put it that way I am reminded of my youthful efforts at solving puzzles in Sierra Online text adventures by guessing the right prompt. I guess I got early training for successfully interacting with LLMs :)
- dylan604 3y ago
  it reminds me of all the old text games like Zorg or whatever where they gave you a cursor leaving you to figure out what you could ask/say/do. which is fine for a game. it sux for a "tool"
  - gopher_space 3y ago
    > like Zorg or whatever Ow, right in the AARP flyer.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  There are obviously cases where CUIs work well: while driving if you don’t have a physical button to do the thing you want, the CUI is better than a screen UI, and if it’s a complex thing, you would never have a physical button for it anyways. In the home when you want to control devices in the morning “open all the shades” or “open the north shades”, unlock the door and start the car, etc… Not really conversations though, more like accessible commands. I don’t think we get conversations until the tech improves and the latency goes way down, meaning on device processing of speech at the very least.
RandomWorker 3y ago
Funny fact is that this is core use case I use siri to add things to the reminders app which I have a smart list called "shopping list." It's amazing how great this is, and how many times I use this.
- edu 3y ago
  I do exactly the same.
- axolttl88 3y ago
  This and music control are the uniques cases where Siri Just Works for me. “Add toothpaste to my shopping list” no fluff no nonsense replies, just “I added that to the shopping list” - and it’s on my phone’s Reminders in that list. I wonder how well they’ve optimised Siri for a just few specific use cases like this, because nothing else seems to reliably work on it.
  - skinkestek 3y ago
    Today for the first time I asked Siri for the weather forecast for next week and it actually replied in a sensible way. Until now I have only been saying simple commands like "countdown n minutes" or "call my favorite wife" (I only have one but thankfully she is also my favorite.)
  - RandomWorker 3y ago
    There are supposed to be huge updates to siri this year. So lets hope they don't mess up this function.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      The last major update to Siri took it from passably useable to absolute trash. Let’s hope this does better
- maaaaattttt 3y ago
  I second this. My two other derived commands I use every day are “remind in 2 hours to do X” or “remind me Friday at 7 to take Y”. This and “timer X minutes”. I would be very sad if these were to disappear or to stop working as well as it does now (I like that if I say “remind me tomorrow” when it’s right past midnight it asks for confirmation that I actually mean the same day since it’s “already tomorrow”)
theptip 3y ago
This problem can be solved pretty soon though; given a good enough LLM, and perhaps for power users a configurable set of integrations, you should be able to make any language request, translate it into verbs, and ask for an explanation if you get confusing results. With in-context learning perhaps you can even get to the holy grail of “when I ask for X, please always apply interpretation Y” for personalization. I think the broader context here is that Google is downsizing the current Assistant team in preparation for an LLM-based replacement, perhaps once Gemini has rolled out.
- alganet 3y ago
  Makes sense. What is a good LLM though? I think there's a lot of questions hidden in that part of the solution.
  - theptip 3y ago
    Yeah, beware “no true Scotsman” here. But I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis that GPT-4 is “good enough” or close to it, and when the current assistant services get wired up to LLMs we’ll see a step function in their utility. Apple and Google are both definitely working on this. OpenAI’s voice mode is closer capability-wise, but doesn’t have the integrations; that would be an obvious product for them to do this year. If this doesn’t seem obvious in 1yr I’d say the hypothesis is likely wrong.
    - alganet 3y ago
      Sounds to me like a silver bullet idea. "LLMs will make it good". I don't think voice is a good interface. "It chats like a human" is the lowest possible hanging fruit in terms of product design, and bets everything on the smarts of the tech that's behind it. We are so used to tooling faster than voice. Keyboards and taps are very, very fast. I want digital assistants as smart AND as fast as that, not something smart but incredibly slow to interact with because it needs to dumb itself down to human speech I/O. To me, this is also not about modality or making it more generic. I just don't want an anthropomorphized smart-ass assistant. I want smart tools that actually assist me directly, no chat.
kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
I think it's hilarious that you can't reliably ask Assistant "what is this song?" any more but they've provided a dedicated button for what should be an easy query to process.
geoelectric 3y ago
Echo still syncs with AnyList fwiw. I have an Alexa list called “Grocery” that does a 2-way sync, and use it to accelerate my online Safeway orders via AnyList. You can sync to the default Amazon Shopping list too, but I find it works better if you have a secondary one specifically for sync.
ckrailo 3y ago
Home Assistant can cast dashboard/media/etc to your display, has shopping lists, and has voice assistance. https://www.home-assistant.io/ https://www.home-assistant.io/
dotancohen 3y ago
> Discoverability is zero What's wrong with that? In VIM I like the fact that there is no interface cluttering my workspace. If I need a feature, I search for it online.
- jfim 3y ago
  Vim has an actual manual and things stay relatively stable across releases. It's not the case for the voice assistants, where stuff breaks randomly and features are added/removed without notification.
  - dotancohen 3y ago
    Well then the problem seems to not be with the fundamental lack of discoverablility by UI poking, rather at the lack of official documentation.
- cure 3y ago
  VIM is well designed and stable, so you can learn the interface and be confident that it will work for you next time you use it. It's an amazing tool. Today's voice assistants are the opposite. They are unreliable and completely unstable. They don't have a clear list of commands they understand, let alone some sort of menu system - the documented commands on the manufacturer's websites often don't work. They also randomly change what they can do: stuff stops working for no obviously reason. For example - yesterday, my son's Nest Audio suddenly refused to set a music alarm, claiming "this device doesn't support that feature yet" (it's literally a speaker for music...). It worked the day before.
  - dotancohen 3y ago
    So the problem is with lack of documentation and unstable UI, not with the lack of discoverablility per se. Identifying the problem is often the first step in fixing it.
rolltrunhert 3y ago
Yikes. About the discoverability issue. I can add a little story. I can not for the love of my life get Siri to resume play in my native tongue. It is supported by Siri, I just have no clue on earth on what phrases she accepts. Tried many, started feeling dumb. Turned off Siri.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
davely 3y ago
The kids used to love our Google mini speaker. There were voice activated games, normal stories, choose your own adventure style stories and a fun little “animal of the day” feature. Every single one of those things have been deprecated and removed for… reasons? All we can do with the speaker now is ask it to play music, get the weather, or set a timer.
- droopyEyelids 3y ago
  I remember being jealous of how much friends could do with the google assistant while i was stuck with siri. Surprising to hear that Google assistant is now equivalent to Siri!
6figurelenins 3y ago
> "Hey Google, add <x> to the shopping list"... was very useful... Then one day Google decided to disable that integration. Now the only shopping list you can add to is one Google provides If I recall correctly, "add to my list" originally went to shoppinglist.google.com. They rolled it into Keep[1] ("note to self," tags, sharing). It works well. However... In 2016, I figured "tell me showtimes for $MOVIE in $CITY" should work. It still doesn't work. It may never work, because "robot butler with ads" is no one's idea of the future. (Maybe Jeff.) A fire-and-forget voice action like "add to list" should still work(?). For conversations[2], we can pray Gemini is less infuriating. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.keep https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... [2] https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset
- Eezee 3y ago
  Did you actually try your cinema prompt recently? I just asked my pixel phone "tell me showtimes for aquaman in Berlin" and it immediately opened an overview of cinemas with showtimes for the Aquaman movie today with options to buy the ticket. Same for the weather prompt someone else posted above and contrary to their experience it showed me exactly what I expected. I'm a bit confused if those examples are something that didn't work in the past or if it's something that somehow doesn't work properly in the US right now.
  - 6figurelenins 3y ago
    "Hey Google, give me showtimes for Aquaman" opens the assistant on my phone, and transcribes my request correctly. There's a Nest mini (2nd gen) two meters away, but the device that answers is the Google Home 2016 in a different room. First attempt: "Okay, ten minutes. And that's starting... Now." Second attempt: "Sorry, I don't understand." Third attempt: bingo. Further trials seem to work, until they're interrupted by the 10 minute timer. My partner comes downstairs to ask why I'm yelling STOP. I remember my exact words when I bought this thing: I have seen the future, and it sucks.
nf3 3y ago
Who in their right mind would bring this kind of intrusive technology into their home, right into their most intimate space? I seriously don't get it. I mean what's wrong with keeping a pen & paper shopping list on your fridge?
- afavour 3y ago
  In what world is your kitchen your most intimate space?
  - swalling 3y ago
    The one where you actually have meaningful and personal conversations with your partner and family in the kitchen. You know, like a human. Also a lot of people rent studios and one bedrooms or otherwise have open floor plans.
    - afavour 3y ago
      I’m not denying that personal conversations happen in the kitchen. But the most intimate space? That’s pure hyperbole. Not to mention I think the paranoia about these home assistant devices is overblown. Do you use a smartphone? In your intimate kitchen?? It has just as much capability to listen to you.
      - allarm 3y ago
        > Do you use a smartphone? We have a saying that loosely translates to “If the barn burns down, so does the house”. The meaning is that it’s not really wise to let the house burn down if the barn is burning.
      - swalling 3y ago
        You’re making an argument of false equivalency. Anyone who has used Siri can tell you that its listening capabilities are vastly overstated. There is a reason they make smart speakers and don’t just leverage your phone, despite the fact that almost everyone with a smart speaker has both.
squarefoot 3y ago
> I'd have something in my hands I just pulled from the fridge (e.g. milk) and be able to add it to the list without interrupting what I'm doing. Non user-hostile technology would happily solve this problem: you pull from the fridge what is about to finish or before throwing the empty container into the trash, put it in front of a mini camera mounted on the fridge, image (possibly also barcode) recognition would identify the product, then you say a magic word and it would be added it to your list directly on the phone, then software would calculate the best path to the shops having in stock the products in the list. Sadly, this would be hijacked by businesses in no time by making it dependent from some cloud services then selling your data to other advertisers or by pestering you with offers of similar competing products. As of today, I still prefer a pen and a piece of paper over any type of automation.
_nivlac_ 3y ago
I had the same issue with the Google Assistant/AnyList integration, and I hacked together a pair of Lambda functions to move Keep list items to an AnyList list. Both unofficial APIs ;) If anybody's curious, repo with most of the code is here: https://github.com/csimpf/keep2anylist https://github.com/csimpf/keep2anylist. Happy to answer any questions about it!
xnx 3y ago
A big portion of the limited discovery of available commands is deliberate so as not to limit what you might ask it to do, which can be used as input for future capabilities.
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
I think in general integration is the biggest issues with these voice assistants. I want to use Microsoft ToDo for my tasks. Why? I use Outlook everywhere. I don't want have to keep track of tasks somewhere else. I'm looking forward to the EU forcing companies to allow more integrations.

paradox460 3y ago

The removal of the AnyList integration drove us to get an Alexa assistant device in the kitchen. It still works there Never thought amazon would have the better assistant ecosystem. Google already has my email and calendar and other stuff, Amazon I have to auth into them like a third party. But it's become true

afavour 3y ago
I've been meaning to get around to trying an Apple HomePod Mini, the AnyList integration on my iPhone works okay (thought as an infuriating two-step process, "Hey Siri, add to shopping list" ... "milk") so hopefully it would be replicable on the pod, too. Seems like the least worst option.
- paradox460 3y ago
  I've been playing with homeassistant voice integration and it's pretty darn good There are some gpt and llama experiments you can run there, but it's finally getting to the point where a local assistant you host yourself might be viable soon Getting audio into it and having a little speaker so it can talk back is both the easiest and the hardest part. I need to play around more with some esp32s and microphone modules
- speg 3y ago
  I do this on my HomePod mini all the time. Take last apple out of fridge? “Siri, add apples to my grocery list.” Boom, done. Synced with my wife too. This is using the Apple Reminders though, as it seems to have less friction than third party apps…

pflenker 3y ago

On top of what you mentioned in your first sentence, any ideas to improve discoverability are horrible. I hate it when Alexa does not play my podcast right away but explains to me how I can change episodes. I despise Alexa for telling me that I have some notification before starting my timer. And so on - any voice only attempt to explain me something without me asking for it means adding a lot of friction between me and my goal.

ethbr1 3y ago
The issue is that everyone removed hierarchical menus and replaced them with... nothing. There is no command ontology anymore. Consequently, discovering commands in-app is UX anathema. "Use the internet, buddy. One of our customers probably documented how-to somewhere on it."
- Loughla 3y ago
  Seriously though. The development of every company to just trash faq's or an "assistant" or third party forums is awful. Trying to get help with technology is almost always infuriating now. I recently had to contact windows help, and they were useless. The windows forum points to a third party software that I am convinced is malware. And while I'm ranting, why can't the download folders in windows be set to group by "none" and sort by "name" by default? Why are both "most recently edited" by default? AND WHY CAN'T I CHANGE IT MICROSOFT?
  - adjagu 3y ago
    Maybe WinSetView [0] and the options [1] it provides might be of use to you? It was able to resolve the issues I was facing so hopefully it can work for you as well. [0]: https://github.com/LesFerch/WinSetView https://github.com/LesFerch/WinSetView [1]: https://github.com/LesFerch/WinSetView/blob/main/README-more.md https://github.com/LesFerch/WinSetView/blob/main/README-more...
- havercosine 3y ago
  Spot on! Lot of voice assistants have been following "if we could" line instead of "if we should line". For many straightforward applications, clicking through well defined interface can be the least error prone way to get the job done.

genman 3y ago

This looks like an anti competitive action that should be investigated.

lxgr 3y ago
I think Google has actually removed all third-party integrations for Assistant a while ago: https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset In other words, they have just closed down that entire ecosystem. I don't think there's an antitrust angle here: Forcing e.g. Apple to allow third-party apps or app stores seems within reach (at least in the EU); this would be more like forcing Apple to enable apps in a world where they don't even exist (anymore).
- 6figurelenins 3y ago
  "If there is no banner, your Actions project is not a Conversational Action and won’t be affected." Here, "conversational" means your voice command should prompt the app to ask you a question, driving a state machine. (Set a reminder. When do you want to be reminded?) I haven't tried to use it, but the docs indicate CRUD-over-voice ("built-in intents") is unaffected. https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset#what_will_happen_to_non-conversational_action_development_paths https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset#what_will_... https://developer.android.com/reference/app-actions/built-in-intents/common/create-thing https://developer.android.com/reference/app-actions/built-in...
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Aren’t these only available on Android, though (i.e. not on Home speakers)?

1234letshaveatw 3y ago

you can tell someone lives in California when the most-used assistant feature isn't asking about the weather

afavour 3y ago
Quite the opposite. I bike the kids to school every morning. The weather is too important to be summed up by a voice summary, I need the hour by hour details.
- danielbln 3y ago
  I can ask Alexa e.g. "what's the weather at 9am", that doesn't work with Google Assistant?
  - riversflow 3y ago
    Not OP, but I want to see an hour by hour forecast for the day. If there is precip, I want to see an animated active radar view, with forecast frames. “What’s the weather @ time” is inadequate. I live in California(albeit not on the coast or in the valley).
  - achates 3y ago
    "The weather in Nijmegen is..."
    - esafak 3y ago
      Also fails when you live in a town that has homonyms, so it can fail even when it correctly hears the word. Wrong country, that's all!
    - aworks 3y ago
      I tried this and Alexa replied: The temperature in Nyagen, Russia is current -31 degrees... I'm an American but I've been to Nijmegen so I think my pronunciation was ok.
  - 3y ago

pkulak 3y ago

I still have a Google Home in the kitchen, but what I really want it to display is data from my weather station, transit info, the time, etc. I can't control that damn thing at all. I've got a TidByt coming today, which I have high hopes for!

spankalee 3y ago
I haven't used it myself, but Home Assistant can cast to a Google Home Hub, so afaiu, you can set up a whole dashboard of widgets and controls and use it from a stock Home Hub.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 3y ago
  And touch interface works on the casted lovelace dashboards too! Completely opens up these displays to be a virtually unrestricted canvas for doing or displaying anything you want.
- rohansingh 3y ago
  I'm going to have to try that out, my whole apartment is mostly Google Home-based. That said, we are building a Home Assistant integration at Tidbyt as well.
  - pkulak 3y ago
    Nice! What I really want, though, is a local API! I can use a starlark script to grab entity states from my local Home Assistant super easy... but then I have to cUrl them up to a Tidbyt server somewhere, only to have it sent right back into my house. Seems kinda silly, and will break anytime my internet goes out.
- jfim 3y ago
  Are you referring to casting a URL to open a browser on the home hub? I tried that in the past but it was kinda janky. It's definitely possible with something like https://demille.github.io/url-cast-receiver/ https://demille.github.io/url-cast-receiver/ though
3y ago

esafak 3y ago

It's not just voice, but conversational interfaces in general that have this discoverability problem. That means chatGPT. I'm glad people are discovering it, if you excuse the pun. CUIs are not a panacea, not a replacement for conventional UIs.

gr__or 3y ago
I think there's a line worth drawing here: Pre-LLM voice interfaces required you to guess the command(s) the designer of the thinking were having in mind for the action you want to perform. With LLMs you can be 10ft into human-level vaguery and metaphorism and your intent might still survive. So the difference wrt discovery is that you only have to gesture at what you wanna do and, if a matching action exists, there is a chance it will be understood. I'd wager we'll see a renaissance of voice assistants with LLMs, especially once the good-enough ones can run on device.
- esafak 3y ago
  When you put it that way I am reminded of my youthful efforts at solving puzzles in Sierra Online text adventures by guessing the right prompt. I guess I got early training for successfully interacting with LLMs :)
dylan604 3y ago
it reminds me of all the old text games like Zorg or whatever where they gave you a cursor leaving you to figure out what you could ask/say/do. which is fine for a game. it sux for a "tool"
- gopher_space 3y ago
  > like Zorg or whatever Ow, right in the AARP flyer.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
There are obviously cases where CUIs work well: while driving if you don’t have a physical button to do the thing you want, the CUI is better than a screen UI, and if it’s a complex thing, you would never have a physical button for it anyways. In the home when you want to control devices in the morning “open all the shades” or “open the north shades”, unlock the door and start the car, etc… Not really conversations though, more like accessible commands. I don’t think we get conversations until the tech improves and the latency goes way down, meaning on device processing of speech at the very least.

RandomWorker 3y ago

Funny fact is that this is core use case I use siri to add things to the reminders app which I have a smart list called "shopping list." It's amazing how great this is, and how many times I use this.

edu 3y ago
I do exactly the same.
axolttl88 3y ago
This and music control are the uniques cases where Siri Just Works for me. “Add toothpaste to my shopping list” no fluff no nonsense replies, just “I added that to the shopping list” - and it’s on my phone’s Reminders in that list. I wonder how well they’ve optimised Siri for a just few specific use cases like this, because nothing else seems to reliably work on it.
- skinkestek 3y ago
  Today for the first time I asked Siri for the weather forecast for next week and it actually replied in a sensible way. Until now I have only been saying simple commands like "countdown n minutes" or "call my favorite wife" (I only have one but thankfully she is also my favorite.)
- RandomWorker 3y ago
  There are supposed to be huge updates to siri this year. So lets hope they don't mess up this function.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    The last major update to Siri took it from passably useable to absolute trash. Let’s hope this does better
maaaaattttt 3y ago
I second this. My two other derived commands I use every day are “remind in 2 hours to do X” or “remind me Friday at 7 to take Y”. This and “timer X minutes”. I would be very sad if these were to disappear or to stop working as well as it does now (I like that if I say “remind me tomorrow” when it’s right past midnight it asks for confirmation that I actually mean the same day since it’s “already tomorrow”)

theptip 3y ago

This problem can be solved pretty soon though; given a good enough LLM, and perhaps for power users a configurable set of integrations, you should be able to make any language request, translate it into verbs, and ask for an explanation if you get confusing results. With in-context learning perhaps you can even get to the holy grail of “when I ask for X, please always apply interpretation Y” for personalization. I think the broader context here is that Google is downsizing the current Assistant team in preparation for an LLM-based replacement, perhaps once Gemini has rolled out.

alganet 3y ago
Makes sense. What is a good LLM though? I think there's a lot of questions hidden in that part of the solution.
- theptip 3y ago
  Yeah, beware “no true Scotsman” here. But I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis that GPT-4 is “good enough” or close to it, and when the current assistant services get wired up to LLMs we’ll see a step function in their utility. Apple and Google are both definitely working on this. OpenAI’s voice mode is closer capability-wise, but doesn’t have the integrations; that would be an obvious product for them to do this year. If this doesn’t seem obvious in 1yr I’d say the hypothesis is likely wrong.
  - alganet 3y ago
    Sounds to me like a silver bullet idea. "LLMs will make it good". I don't think voice is a good interface. "It chats like a human" is the lowest possible hanging fruit in terms of product design, and bets everything on the smarts of the tech that's behind it. We are so used to tooling faster than voice. Keyboards and taps are very, very fast. I want digital assistants as smart AND as fast as that, not something smart but incredibly slow to interact with because it needs to dumb itself down to human speech I/O. To me, this is also not about modality or making it more generic. I just don't want an anthropomorphized smart-ass assistant. I want smart tools that actually assist me directly, no chat.

kevin_thibedeau 3y ago

I think it's hilarious that you can't reliably ask Assistant "what is this song?" any more but they've provided a dedicated button for what should be an easy query to process.

geoelectric 3y ago

Echo still syncs with AnyList fwiw. I have an Alexa list called “Grocery” that does a 2-way sync, and use it to accelerate my online Safeway orders via AnyList. You can sync to the default Amazon Shopping list too, but I find it works better if you have a secondary one specifically for sync.

ckrailo 3y ago

Home Assistant can cast dashboard/media/etc to your display, has shopping lists, and has voice assistance. https://www.home-assistant.io/ https://www.home-assistant.io/

dotancohen 3y ago

> Discoverability is zero What's wrong with that? In VIM I like the fact that there is no interface cluttering my workspace. If I need a feature, I search for it online.

jfim 3y ago
Vim has an actual manual and things stay relatively stable across releases. It's not the case for the voice assistants, where stuff breaks randomly and features are added/removed without notification.
- dotancohen 3y ago
  Well then the problem seems to not be with the fundamental lack of discoverablility by UI poking, rather at the lack of official documentation.
cure 3y ago
VIM is well designed and stable, so you can learn the interface and be confident that it will work for you next time you use it. It's an amazing tool. Today's voice assistants are the opposite. They are unreliable and completely unstable. They don't have a clear list of commands they understand, let alone some sort of menu system - the documented commands on the manufacturer's websites often don't work. They also randomly change what they can do: stuff stops working for no obviously reason. For example - yesterday, my son's Nest Audio suddenly refused to set a music alarm, claiming "this device doesn't support that feature yet" (it's literally a speaker for music...). It worked the day before.
- dotancohen 3y ago
  So the problem is with lack of documentation and unstable UI, not with the lack of discoverablility per se. Identifying the problem is often the first step in fixing it.

rolltrunhert 3y ago

Yikes. About the discoverability issue. I can add a little story. I can not for the love of my life get Siri to resume play in my native tongue. It is supported by Siri, I just have no clue on earth on what phrases she accepts. Tried many, started feeling dumb. Turned off Siri.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

davely 3y ago

The kids used to love our Google mini speaker. There were voice activated games, normal stories, choose your own adventure style stories and a fun little “animal of the day” feature. Every single one of those things have been deprecated and removed for… reasons? All we can do with the speaker now is ask it to play music, get the weather, or set a timer.

droopyEyelids 3y ago
I remember being jealous of how much friends could do with the google assistant while i was stuck with siri. Surprising to hear that Google assistant is now equivalent to Siri!

6figurelenins 3y ago

> "Hey Google, add <x> to the shopping list"... was very useful... Then one day Google decided to disable that integration. Now the only shopping list you can add to is one Google provides If I recall correctly, "add to my list" originally went to shoppinglist.google.com. They rolled it into Keep[1] ("note to self," tags, sharing). It works well. However... In 2016, I figured "tell me showtimes for $MOVIE in $CITY" should work. It still doesn't work. It may never work, because "robot butler with ads" is no one's idea of the future. (Maybe Jeff.) A fire-and-forget voice action like "add to list" should still work(?). For conversations[2], we can pray Gemini is less infuriating. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.keep https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... [2] https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset

Eezee 3y ago
Did you actually try your cinema prompt recently? I just asked my pixel phone "tell me showtimes for aquaman in Berlin" and it immediately opened an overview of cinemas with showtimes for the Aquaman movie today with options to buy the ticket. Same for the weather prompt someone else posted above and contrary to their experience it showed me exactly what I expected. I'm a bit confused if those examples are something that didn't work in the past or if it's something that somehow doesn't work properly in the US right now.
- 6figurelenins 3y ago
  "Hey Google, give me showtimes for Aquaman" opens the assistant on my phone, and transcribes my request correctly. There's a Nest mini (2nd gen) two meters away, but the device that answers is the Google Home 2016 in a different room. First attempt: "Okay, ten minutes. And that's starting... Now." Second attempt: "Sorry, I don't understand." Third attempt: bingo. Further trials seem to work, until they're interrupted by the 10 minute timer. My partner comes downstairs to ask why I'm yelling STOP. I remember my exact words when I bought this thing: I have seen the future, and it sucks.

nf3 3y ago

Who in their right mind would bring this kind of intrusive technology into their home, right into their most intimate space? I seriously don't get it. I mean what's wrong with keeping a pen & paper shopping list on your fridge?

afavour 3y ago
In what world is your kitchen your most intimate space?
- swalling 3y ago
  The one where you actually have meaningful and personal conversations with your partner and family in the kitchen. You know, like a human. Also a lot of people rent studios and one bedrooms or otherwise have open floor plans.
  - afavour 3y ago
    I’m not denying that personal conversations happen in the kitchen. But the most intimate space? That’s pure hyperbole. Not to mention I think the paranoia about these home assistant devices is overblown. Do you use a smartphone? In your intimate kitchen?? It has just as much capability to listen to you.
    - allarm 3y ago
      > Do you use a smartphone? We have a saying that loosely translates to “If the barn burns down, so does the house”. The meaning is that it’s not really wise to let the house burn down if the barn is burning.
    - swalling 3y ago
      You’re making an argument of false equivalency. Anyone who has used Siri can tell you that its listening capabilities are vastly overstated. There is a reason they make smart speakers and don’t just leverage your phone, despite the fact that almost everyone with a smart speaker has both.

squarefoot 3y ago

> I'd have something in my hands I just pulled from the fridge (e.g. milk) and be able to add it to the list without interrupting what I'm doing. Non user-hostile technology would happily solve this problem: you pull from the fridge what is about to finish or before throwing the empty container into the trash, put it in front of a mini camera mounted on the fridge, image (possibly also barcode) recognition would identify the product, then you say a magic word and it would be added it to your list directly on the phone, then software would calculate the best path to the shops having in stock the products in the list. Sadly, this would be hijacked by businesses in no time by making it dependent from some cloud services then selling your data to other advertisers or by pestering you with offers of similar competing products. As of today, I still prefer a pen and a piece of paper over any type of automation.

_nivlac_ 3y ago

I had the same issue with the Google Assistant/AnyList integration, and I hacked together a pair of Lambda functions to move Keep list items to an AnyList list. Both unofficial APIs ;) If anybody's curious, repo with most of the code is here: https://github.com/csimpf/keep2anylist https://github.com/csimpf/keep2anylist. Happy to answer any questions about it!

xnx 3y ago

A big portion of the limited discovery of available commands is deliberate so as not to limit what you might ask it to do, which can be used as input for future capabilities.

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

I think in general integration is the biggest issues with these voice assistants. I want to use Microsoft ToDo for my tasks. Why? I use Outlook everywhere. I don't want have to keep track of tasks somewhere else. I'm looking forward to the EU forcing companies to allow more integrations.