2 ms·

Am I alone in thinking assistants were useful when they had a constrained set of operations that fits our heads? Now Google Maps tells Spotify to play a song ca

• zmmmmm 3y ago
  It's one of my great fascinations that assistants worked better in 2010 in my opinion than they do now. I remember setting timers, adding reminders and asking the weather back then and it was amazing, it could interpret very flexibly worded versions of my requests almost perfectly every time ("Add a reminder a week from now" etc). But steadily over the years this functionality seems to have degraded. It's got more and more hit and miss and finally I've just stopped using it. I don't really understand why ... I assume it's happened as they've tried to make the systems more flexible and accommodate wider inputs (different accents etc), it's made them worse at the more constrained use cases.
  • Workaccount2 3y ago
    You're not alone. Maybe not 2010 though, hah. 2015-2017 was the golden age at least of Google assistant (or was it still Google Now?). Fast, responsive, and accurate. Now in 2024 it's grindingly slow and unreliable.
• michaelt 3y ago
  I believe the hope is the nuanced language understanding of LLM could correctly parse "What's the name of this road?" and know it's not a request to pass to Spotify.