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I have a hard time seeing how this isn't obvious. 95% of everyday AI needs (for the people that even bother to interact with it) are covered by ChatGPT, and mos

I have a hard time seeing how this isn't obvious. 95% of everyday AI needs (for the people that even bother to interact with it) are covered by ChatGPT, and most of that is the same stuff that Google was handling before. From personal experience, the only thing that changed when replacing the "old" Google Assistant with the Gemini-powered one on my Pixel was that it's no longer able to create reminders.

JohnClark1337 2y ago
[dead]
jeffbee 2y ago
I just asked my Pixel to remind me next Tuesday to pick the bananas, and it set that in Google Tasks. Which part of this doesn't work?
- kspacewalk2 2y ago
  I've set a reminder through Gemini, then tried to change its time. Told me there are no active reminders to change. Created another reminder with correct time. Got both reminders.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    I said "Hey Google instead of reminding me about the bananas on Tuesday, remind me on Wednesday" and that worked. It's quite possible these things only work on Android 15 QPR 1, or only on a Pixel Pro, or who knows. Its capabilities have noticeably expanded in the last few months. One thing I know it still can't do, that the old Assistant did, is control a Sonos. ETA: The joke is I don't even have Google Tasks installed, so I am not sure what effect those Tasks items would have. They might only surface on the side pane of Gmail.
  - lupire 2y ago
    Failing to set reminders/alarms is core Google technology, #2 only to PageRank itself.
- blackoil 2y ago
  I asked if to create task for Monday morning. It created one, Monday 12AM.
- larntz 2y ago
  I have a Pixel also, and have issues with is since the change to Gemini. It works _most_ of the time, but every once in a while it'll tell me it can't set a reminder. I use reminders often so I suppose it is a low failure rate. But, when they first made the change to Gemini I had to switch back for a few weeks/months before it could set reminders properly.
- bluGill 2y ago
  I want the reminder not on my device, but on my work computer which I'll be staring at when I need the reminder. Or in the bananas case I want bananas sent to our shared family grocery app (which isn't a google service) so that if my wife happens to be going by a store tomorrow she knows to stop and get some along with flour or whatever else we need to stock up on.
xvector 2y ago
"Everyday AI" hasn't even been built yet tbh. Where is my assistant that notices my flight has been delayed and reschedules my appointments and lets my contacts know?
- literalAardvark 2y ago
  That's agentic behaviour, and the first to offer it publicly are anthropic, who just opened a beta. It's still pretty terrible though
  - no_wizard 2y ago
    I love how the goal post is being moved publicly as to what AI means. AI is anything automated it seems, and now they’re being subcategorized into niches as to what they do, e.g. “Agentic AI”, “LLM backed AI systems” etc. If it’s not real intelligence then it isn’t really AI, and I wish the world at large would call it out. LLM, Machine Learning, Neural Networks etc are all great but none of them have true spontaneous intelligence or learning ability. Please, someone point out how any of these systems have organic spontaneous learning ability for a subject it was not pre-data seeded on. This is a generally accepted measure of higher level sentience as far as I’m aware
    - revscat 2y ago
      > it’s not real intelligence Hence the predicated “artificial”, and hence the downvotes you are currently receiving. Your message is largely, if not entirely, a strawman.
      - no_wizard 2y ago
        None of these exhibit any accepted definitions of intelligence markers. The intelligence isn’t artificial, it doesn’t exist is my point. If you apply the commonly accepted definitions of what is considered display of intelligent behavior. One aspect of which is the ability to adapt to new circumstances that you haven’t experienced before. There has been considerable success in programming computers to draw inferences, for example, but not actual reasoning. You can mimic some forms of reasoning but you can’t take one ML set - like recognizing photos with mountains, then expect it to correctly identify a similar geographical element - a hill. It can’t do that. It may correctly identify that it’s not a mountain but that isn’t the same thing as actually learning it’s similar to a mountain but not the same, which would be a rudimentary definition of a hill that an intelligent entity could conceivably use if it knew what a mountain was but not a hill. Machine Learning was always a more honest place to have This discourse. I am indeed pushing back on the idea that we should be calling ChatGPT or anything like it intelligence. It’s Machine Learning, clever algorithms, Large language Models, among other things, that are trained on ways to mimic certain aspects of intelligence, but it does not actually possess any real intelligence. Look at the LLM hallucination problem for example. It can’t be self corrected because it’s not an intelligent system. Moving the goal post on what AI means (and pushing AGI as some new goalpost) is disingenuous, and relatively recent. I’d care not if it wasn’t for the fact there is so much misinformation around capabilities and the future of AI, that it’s already negatively crept into policy making for example.
kredd 2y ago
The problem is, vast majority of smartphone usage is done for entertainment and social networking purposes (IG, TikTok, Twitter, HN, gaming, Netflix and etc.). If you’re mostly scrolling and consuming, I can’t imagine how current AI tooling can help you other than some summarization of texts. Sure, for productivity cases it might be legitimate, but that’s not what supermajority of people use a phone for.
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  No, the problem is that "AI" just isn't any good at almost anything.
  - kredd 2y ago
    You can argue that, but there are legitimate "AI" workflows that have already been adapted in workplaces where things function well enough. I'm sure 99% of it is just slop, most companies will fail, but some things will survive, become commoditized and taken for granted in about 5 years.
- paul7986 2y ago
  Im not sure people really know how to use an AI chat bot or understand its a more powerful, quicker and personally more fun way of getting information then just a Google search Some personal examples of how I find it more useful (love to hear yours) and fun to use.... - Wanted to go on a hike an hour away from where both my friend (lives two hours west of me) and I live. Asked GPT what are some good hikes an hour drive away from both of us to meet & hike. With Google I have to do Many searches where GPT just provides the answer right away. - I count calories and eat out everyday. GPT knows the calories of everything i eat as I eat at chains mostly (Cava, Panera, Starbucks, Chipolte). I tell it via voice what i just ate for my 1st meal, it calculates my calorie count and later I'll tell it what im having for my 2nd meal. It can also recall my calorie count from days ago. It does all this quickly vs. Google i'd have to do oodles of searches. Usually Im using GPT the most when driving via voice and unlike Siri, GPT understands me and i can have whole conversations with it to get things done while driving.
est31 2y ago
Computational photography uses AI a lot (next to parametric approaches), and without these algorithms, smartphone cameras would be quite shitty. People do care about that. AI isn't just LLM chatbots.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- artwr 2y ago
  I know that's true, but I find that the images on my Pixel are starting to have a bit of an eery feel, with some of the details looking more and more like AI generated images. I'd give back a bit of the quality for more "natural" looking images.
  - wlesieutre 2y ago
    That’s the line of thinking behind Halide’s recent “process zero” feature on iOS https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220178/halide-camera-app-process-zero-ai https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220178/halide-camera-ap...
  - renegade-otter 2y ago
    Here you go: https://www.theverge.com/c/24208960/digicam-digital-camera-comeback-2004-gen-z-nikon-coolpix https://www.theverge.com/c/24208960/digicam-digital-camera-c...
- ARandomerDude 2y ago
  Right but in street surveys nobody knows that. Most people just call it "better camera."
  - B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago
    ... then one day the tentacles come out ... https://i.redd.it/j1cr7pr6m7j71.jpg https://i.redd.it/j1cr7pr6m7j71.jpg
- no_wizard 2y ago
candiddevmike 2y ago
Changing to Gemini broke all of my smart home commands. Keeps trying to search/LLM how to turn off kitchen lights.
- crustaceansoup 2y ago
  It also sometimes asks to unlock my phone for commands that plain old Assistant was happy to do while locked. I haven't really found it useful at all yet, free ChatGPT is just better than free Gemini for "LLM stuff" and Google Assistant is better for "smart home stuff"
- connicpu 2y ago
  I've been thinking about trying the OpenAI integration for home assistant[1], because controlling things in my home is primarily what I use my assistant shortcut for. The normal assistant works well enough but can be frustrating if you don't remember the exact phrasing it wants to activate a certain command. [1]: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/openai_conversation https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/openai_conversati...
  - grahamj 2y ago
    I have it set up with ollama. It’s… interesting. HA commands are provided to the model as tools so it works as well as the model is able to determine when and how to use tools. From experimenting with that and my own tool use code I’ve found that models vary greatly in their ability to wield tools and none that I’ve tried are exceptional. It’s neat that you can intermix general chatting with HA commands but you’re probably going to find that the old assist is more reliable for commands. What I do like is that you can use a template as your system prompt so you can provide the state of a number of entities and then ask for them with natural language. That works well. I have an Alexa/Echo voice announcement system set up and have recently tied that into assist so I can do automations like if the garage opens I prompt for “what is the state of the garage?” and announce the result. Makes it feel more humane than the same plain announcements all the time.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Do try it. I've been running it ever since it got integrated into the core, mostly to control A/C units around our flat, and it's the best voice assistant experience I had to date. I mean honestly, how is it possible Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft[0] all keep screwing this up for over a decade now? I literally spent 15 minutes hooking up GPT-4 to the Home Assistant integration, and I was able to semi-reliably[1] control actual devices[2] like air conditioners and smart lights, in a completely natural and ad-hoc way, by talking to my smartwatch on the go, or to a phone, whatever was more convenient at the moment. It's a really magical experience, a step closer to Star Trek reality. And what makes it possible is not just LLMs being able to deal with natural language, but more importantly, "bring your own API key" model allowing to cut away all the bullshit that FAANG assistants are stuck in. -- [0] - Ever since they dropped MS Speech API in Windows, and did the Cortana thing. Some 15 years passed, at this point, and I'd still prefer to work with the Speech API than to touch any of the FAANGs' voice assistant - it worked, and worked off-line! [1] - Works ~90% of the time; some 5% of the time the voice model (from Home Assistant Cloud) misunderstands me, and 5% of the time the LLM gets confused. It's still worth it, because I can actually talk to it like to a person, without thinking of style or grammar or magic keywords. [2] - Which, given the level of integration of Home Assistant companion app with the phone, can be easily turned into an equivalent of on-phone voice assistant that can do more than the one I got from Google. Critically, there are ways to couple Home Assistant app and Tasker, so it's not hard to make it do arbitrary things on your phone. And, if you don't like low-ish code Tasker experience, you can trivially shell out from Tasker to Termux, at which point sky is the limit. Point being, an enthusiastic non-developer with minimal tech aptitude can beat Google and Apple at the voice assistant game today.
grahamj 2y ago
> 95% of everyday AI needs (for the people that even bother to interact with it) are covered by ChatGPT True, but it is an external service with all the privacy concerns that entails. I appreciate eg. Apple pushing local AI but at the same time I don’t think it needs to ship with the OS. Just provide an AI API apps can hook into then I can decide which models I want and where they run.
swatcoder 2y ago
I'm not sure that's true. Not everybody is hounding for information from the web in the first place. Apple's approach of using current-boom AI to help you navigate and digest your own private trove of multimedia content (photos, videos, apps, notes, structured data, etc) is absolutely useful to people as well, and for some of us, one of the only personal uses of this AI that seems compelling at all. I'm much more excited to have help finding that goofy picture of my cat by describing what I remember, so I can share it with a friend, than I am to have some chatbot dialog about entry-level Python with a hallucinating parlor trick. But these features have to work, and work well, and work fast, and be widely known to work, before they'll really win the market. But that's going to take a minute and it might not even happen.
- okasaki 2y ago
  It's great for spooks too. Now they just have to exfiltrate the keywords describing the images instead of the images themselves.
  - fao_ 2y ago
    I'm not sure that a hallucinated image of something is better than the original image when you're doing spywork. The difference between whether someone has 4 or 5 fingers, whether they're holding a gun versus a random object, or whether they're mixed-race or caucasian, all seem like they would be pretty important things. Likewise, car number plates, signage in the photo that help identify where it is, metadata of the image itself (often more useful than the image), are all incredibly important. All of those are things that AI is absolutely terrible at lmao.
    - qup 2y ago
      He's not talking about generating images, he's talking about classifying existing ones.
      - fao_ 2y ago
        > Now they just have to exfiltrate the keywords describing the images instead of the images themselves. I'm not sure how a bunch of probably-correct keywords that miss a lot of the important aforementioned details in the image is more useful than the image itself, or it's metadata. Both of which would be lost. My point applies equally with respect to image classification, too.
ffsm8 2y ago
The only thing that changed for me was a that it couldn't control my smart Home devices anymore, nor activate navigation, nor send messages via Whatsapp (I.e. while driving). Literally every thing I used it for got answered via "I cannot do that yet" after it randomly opted me into that. Pure garbage.
- piyush_soni 2y ago
  Then why are you using it? I tried using Gemini once on my Pixel 6. Couldn't play music on Youtube music on verbal instructions, I switched back to Google Assistant. Will try it again after 6 months now. :)
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Isn't that obvious? They tried to switch back to Google Assistant, but each time they asked Gemini, it said it can't do that yet!
  - ffsm8 2y ago
    > Then why are you using it? I'm not, I pretty much just accepted that Google doesn't care about usability whatsoever and haven't prompted it in a very long time. To be clear, the only time I've ever used it was via "ok Google" in contexts in which I'm unable to interface with the phone directly, i.e while driving. If it doesn't work you'll learn that you can't start driving before queueing the navigation anymore. The voice assistant was a nice feature, but not important enough to waste my time trying to figure out which feature they opted me into and how to get back out of it.
  - xur17 2y ago
    In my case it just kinda.. switched over at some point, and frankly I didn't care enough to figure out how I might switch it back (if I even could). I had a similar frustration to GP that it stopped working for 100% of the queries I used to use it for. That said, at some point it started working better, but there was a good 6-12 months where it was a tire fire.
  - kyriakos 2y ago
addaon 2y ago
> 95% of everyday AI needs This assumes that the capabilities and use cases are unchanged. Yes, for the AI features available today, I suppose ChatGPT can do much of it -- I wouldn't know because it's not interesting or useful to me, so I don't use it. But: If I'm deciding whether AI features are important to me in making a decision to spend money on a future phone, it's those future AI features that I will be assessing. 95% of my everyday needs for an external intelligence (besides my own) are covered by e-mail, text, and phone calls with other humans, with a trivial portion covered by nascent AI features. As this changes, and AI gets more capable of replacing human intelligence in these interactions (TBD if this happens in the next smartphone generation, or the next human generation, or further in the future), then I will /very much/ care that the electronic device that I use most often day-to-day has access to these capabilities, and will very much use access to those capabilities as part of deciding where to spend my money.
- njtransit 2y ago
  You seriously assess "future AI features" when buying a phone? Have you heard the expression "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"? Also, what is the lifetime of a phone? How far in the future are these new features expected?
  - addaon 2y ago
    No, I assess current AI features when buying a phone, in the future. Any survey about what features customers value in phones they are considering buying inherently ask questions about future behavior, occurring in the future’s present.
- HumblyTossed 2y ago
  Apple will just tell you you need an iPhone 17 because it has a more special "you're gonna love it" neural thingy onboard, and so your purchase of a 16 is null.
jefftk 2y ago
> the only thing that changed when replacing the "old" Google Assistant with the Gemini-powered one on my Pixel was that it's no longer able to create reminders Weird! Mine can still create reminders, as well as set timers and alarms.
rbanffy 2y ago
AI’s appeal depends a lot on the features. Battery is important for me (more than being anorexically thin), but I would love an AI that could screen my calls like a smart voice mail that asks questions. Also, being able to talk to my mailbox asking questions about subjects mentioned in my e-mails would be a huge time saver. Imagine a purely local Microsoft Recall-like thing that could answer questions about things you saw, or that read the news articles you went over quickly and answer complicated questions about them much later, at a time you just started to regret not having bookmarked it for future reading.
the_arun 2y ago
AI is usually about implementation details. Customers typically worry about solutions to problems. They don't care how solution is implemented - using AI or not.
Terr_ 2y ago
Perhaps a step further: I do not need my phone to tell me an LLM-generated bedtime story involving a specified cast of characters, I just want it to reliably control existing functionality, dangit. Like when a timed alarm is making the phone buzz in my pocket while I'm driving, I'm telling it to silence the alarm, and the response-voice is regretfully informing me that there are no alarms going off right now.

JohnClark1337 2y ago

[dead]

jeffbee 2y ago

I just asked my Pixel to remind me next Tuesday to pick the bananas, and it set that in Google Tasks. Which part of this doesn't work?

kspacewalk2 2y ago
I've set a reminder through Gemini, then tried to change its time. Told me there are no active reminders to change. Created another reminder with correct time. Got both reminders.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  I said "Hey Google instead of reminding me about the bananas on Tuesday, remind me on Wednesday" and that worked. It's quite possible these things only work on Android 15 QPR 1, or only on a Pixel Pro, or who knows. Its capabilities have noticeably expanded in the last few months. One thing I know it still can't do, that the old Assistant did, is control a Sonos. ETA: The joke is I don't even have Google Tasks installed, so I am not sure what effect those Tasks items would have. They might only surface on the side pane of Gmail.
- lupire 2y ago
  Failing to set reminders/alarms is core Google technology, #2 only to PageRank itself.
blackoil 2y ago
I asked if to create task for Monday morning. It created one, Monday 12AM.
larntz 2y ago
I have a Pixel also, and have issues with is since the change to Gemini. It works _most_ of the time, but every once in a while it'll tell me it can't set a reminder. I use reminders often so I suppose it is a low failure rate. But, when they first made the change to Gemini I had to switch back for a few weeks/months before it could set reminders properly.
bluGill 2y ago
I want the reminder not on my device, but on my work computer which I'll be staring at when I need the reminder. Or in the bananas case I want bananas sent to our shared family grocery app (which isn't a google service) so that if my wife happens to be going by a store tomorrow she knows to stop and get some along with flour or whatever else we need to stock up on.

xvector 2y ago

"Everyday AI" hasn't even been built yet tbh. Where is my assistant that notices my flight has been delayed and reschedules my appointments and lets my contacts know?

literalAardvark 2y ago
That's agentic behaviour, and the first to offer it publicly are anthropic, who just opened a beta. It's still pretty terrible though
- no_wizard 2y ago
  I love how the goal post is being moved publicly as to what AI means. AI is anything automated it seems, and now they’re being subcategorized into niches as to what they do, e.g. “Agentic AI”, “LLM backed AI systems” etc. If it’s not real intelligence then it isn’t really AI, and I wish the world at large would call it out. LLM, Machine Learning, Neural Networks etc are all great but none of them have true spontaneous intelligence or learning ability. Please, someone point out how any of these systems have organic spontaneous learning ability for a subject it was not pre-data seeded on. This is a generally accepted measure of higher level sentience as far as I’m aware
  - revscat 2y ago
    > it’s not real intelligence Hence the predicated “artificial”, and hence the downvotes you are currently receiving. Your message is largely, if not entirely, a strawman.
    - no_wizard 2y ago
      None of these exhibit any accepted definitions of intelligence markers. The intelligence isn’t artificial, it doesn’t exist is my point. If you apply the commonly accepted definitions of what is considered display of intelligent behavior. One aspect of which is the ability to adapt to new circumstances that you haven’t experienced before. There has been considerable success in programming computers to draw inferences, for example, but not actual reasoning. You can mimic some forms of reasoning but you can’t take one ML set - like recognizing photos with mountains, then expect it to correctly identify a similar geographical element - a hill. It can’t do that. It may correctly identify that it’s not a mountain but that isn’t the same thing as actually learning it’s similar to a mountain but not the same, which would be a rudimentary definition of a hill that an intelligent entity could conceivably use if it knew what a mountain was but not a hill. Machine Learning was always a more honest place to have This discourse. I am indeed pushing back on the idea that we should be calling ChatGPT or anything like it intelligence. It’s Machine Learning, clever algorithms, Large language Models, among other things, that are trained on ways to mimic certain aspects of intelligence, but it does not actually possess any real intelligence. Look at the LLM hallucination problem for example. It can’t be self corrected because it’s not an intelligent system. Moving the goal post on what AI means (and pushing AGI as some new goalpost) is disingenuous, and relatively recent. I’d care not if it wasn’t for the fact there is so much misinformation around capabilities and the future of AI, that it’s already negatively crept into policy making for example.

kredd 2y ago

The problem is, vast majority of smartphone usage is done for entertainment and social networking purposes (IG, TikTok, Twitter, HN, gaming, Netflix and etc.). If you’re mostly scrolling and consuming, I can’t imagine how current AI tooling can help you other than some summarization of texts. Sure, for productivity cases it might be legitimate, but that’s not what supermajority of people use a phone for.

mvdtnz 2y ago
No, the problem is that "AI" just isn't any good at almost anything.
- kredd 2y ago
  You can argue that, but there are legitimate "AI" workflows that have already been adapted in workplaces where things function well enough. I'm sure 99% of it is just slop, most companies will fail, but some things will survive, become commoditized and taken for granted in about 5 years.
paul7986 2y ago
Im not sure people really know how to use an AI chat bot or understand its a more powerful, quicker and personally more fun way of getting information then just a Google search Some personal examples of how I find it more useful (love to hear yours) and fun to use.... - Wanted to go on a hike an hour away from where both my friend (lives two hours west of me) and I live. Asked GPT what are some good hikes an hour drive away from both of us to meet & hike. With Google I have to do Many searches where GPT just provides the answer right away. - I count calories and eat out everyday. GPT knows the calories of everything i eat as I eat at chains mostly (Cava, Panera, Starbucks, Chipolte). I tell it via voice what i just ate for my 1st meal, it calculates my calorie count and later I'll tell it what im having for my 2nd meal. It can also recall my calorie count from days ago. It does all this quickly vs. Google i'd have to do oodles of searches. Usually Im using GPT the most when driving via voice and unlike Siri, GPT understands me and i can have whole conversations with it to get things done while driving.

est31 2y ago

Computational photography uses AI a lot (next to parametric approaches), and without these algorithms, smartphone cameras would be quite shitty. People do care about that. AI isn't just LLM chatbots.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
artwr 2y ago
I know that's true, but I find that the images on my Pixel are starting to have a bit of an eery feel, with some of the details looking more and more like AI generated images. I'd give back a bit of the quality for more "natural" looking images.
- wlesieutre 2y ago
  That’s the line of thinking behind Halide’s recent “process zero” feature on iOS https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220178/halide-camera-app-process-zero-ai https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220178/halide-camera-ap...
- renegade-otter 2y ago
  Here you go: https://www.theverge.com/c/24208960/digicam-digital-camera-comeback-2004-gen-z-nikon-coolpix https://www.theverge.com/c/24208960/digicam-digital-camera-c...
ARandomerDude 2y ago
Right but in street surveys nobody knows that. Most people just call it "better camera."
- B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago
  ... then one day the tentacles come out ... https://i.redd.it/j1cr7pr6m7j71.jpg https://i.redd.it/j1cr7pr6m7j71.jpg
no_wizard 2y ago

candiddevmike 2y ago

Changing to Gemini broke all of my smart home commands. Keeps trying to search/LLM how to turn off kitchen lights.

crustaceansoup 2y ago
It also sometimes asks to unlock my phone for commands that plain old Assistant was happy to do while locked. I haven't really found it useful at all yet, free ChatGPT is just better than free Gemini for "LLM stuff" and Google Assistant is better for "smart home stuff"
connicpu 2y ago
I've been thinking about trying the OpenAI integration for home assistant[1], because controlling things in my home is primarily what I use my assistant shortcut for. The normal assistant works well enough but can be frustrating if you don't remember the exact phrasing it wants to activate a certain command. [1]: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/openai_conversation https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/openai_conversati...
- grahamj 2y ago
  I have it set up with ollama. It’s… interesting. HA commands are provided to the model as tools so it works as well as the model is able to determine when and how to use tools. From experimenting with that and my own tool use code I’ve found that models vary greatly in their ability to wield tools and none that I’ve tried are exceptional. It’s neat that you can intermix general chatting with HA commands but you’re probably going to find that the old assist is more reliable for commands. What I do like is that you can use a template as your system prompt so you can provide the state of a number of entities and then ask for them with natural language. That works well. I have an Alexa/Echo voice announcement system set up and have recently tied that into assist so I can do automations like if the garage opens I prompt for “what is the state of the garage?” and announce the result. Makes it feel more humane than the same plain announcements all the time.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Do try it. I've been running it ever since it got integrated into the core, mostly to control A/C units around our flat, and it's the best voice assistant experience I had to date. I mean honestly, how is it possible Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft[0] all keep screwing this up for over a decade now? I literally spent 15 minutes hooking up GPT-4 to the Home Assistant integration, and I was able to semi-reliably[1] control actual devices[2] like air conditioners and smart lights, in a completely natural and ad-hoc way, by talking to my smartwatch on the go, or to a phone, whatever was more convenient at the moment. It's a really magical experience, a step closer to Star Trek reality. And what makes it possible is not just LLMs being able to deal with natural language, but more importantly, "bring your own API key" model allowing to cut away all the bullshit that FAANG assistants are stuck in. -- [0] - Ever since they dropped MS Speech API in Windows, and did the Cortana thing. Some 15 years passed, at this point, and I'd still prefer to work with the Speech API than to touch any of the FAANGs' voice assistant - it worked, and worked off-line! [1] - Works ~90% of the time; some 5% of the time the voice model (from Home Assistant Cloud) misunderstands me, and 5% of the time the LLM gets confused. It's still worth it, because I can actually talk to it like to a person, without thinking of style or grammar or magic keywords. [2] - Which, given the level of integration of Home Assistant companion app with the phone, can be easily turned into an equivalent of on-phone voice assistant that can do more than the one I got from Google. Critically, there are ways to couple Home Assistant app and Tasker, so it's not hard to make it do arbitrary things on your phone. And, if you don't like low-ish code Tasker experience, you can trivially shell out from Tasker to Termux, at which point sky is the limit. Point being, an enthusiastic non-developer with minimal tech aptitude can beat Google and Apple at the voice assistant game today.

grahamj 2y ago

> 95% of everyday AI needs (for the people that even bother to interact with it) are covered by ChatGPT True, but it is an external service with all the privacy concerns that entails. I appreciate eg. Apple pushing local AI but at the same time I don’t think it needs to ship with the OS. Just provide an AI API apps can hook into then I can decide which models I want and where they run.

swatcoder 2y ago

I'm not sure that's true. Not everybody is hounding for information from the web in the first place. Apple's approach of using current-boom AI to help you navigate and digest your own private trove of multimedia content (photos, videos, apps, notes, structured data, etc) is absolutely useful to people as well, and for some of us, one of the only personal uses of this AI that seems compelling at all. I'm much more excited to have help finding that goofy picture of my cat by describing what I remember, so I can share it with a friend, than I am to have some chatbot dialog about entry-level Python with a hallucinating parlor trick. But these features have to work, and work well, and work fast, and be widely known to work, before they'll really win the market. But that's going to take a minute and it might not even happen.

okasaki 2y ago
It's great for spooks too. Now they just have to exfiltrate the keywords describing the images instead of the images themselves.
- fao_ 2y ago
  I'm not sure that a hallucinated image of something is better than the original image when you're doing spywork. The difference between whether someone has 4 or 5 fingers, whether they're holding a gun versus a random object, or whether they're mixed-race or caucasian, all seem like they would be pretty important things. Likewise, car number plates, signage in the photo that help identify where it is, metadata of the image itself (often more useful than the image), are all incredibly important. All of those are things that AI is absolutely terrible at lmao.
  - qup 2y ago
    He's not talking about generating images, he's talking about classifying existing ones.
    - fao_ 2y ago
      > Now they just have to exfiltrate the keywords describing the images instead of the images themselves. I'm not sure how a bunch of probably-correct keywords that miss a lot of the important aforementioned details in the image is more useful than the image itself, or it's metadata. Both of which would be lost. My point applies equally with respect to image classification, too.

ffsm8 2y ago

The only thing that changed for me was a that it couldn't control my smart Home devices anymore, nor activate navigation, nor send messages via Whatsapp (I.e. while driving). Literally every thing I used it for got answered via "I cannot do that yet" after it randomly opted me into that. Pure garbage.

piyush_soni 2y ago
Then why are you using it? I tried using Gemini once on my Pixel 6. Couldn't play music on Youtube music on verbal instructions, I switched back to Google Assistant. Will try it again after 6 months now. :)
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Isn't that obvious? They tried to switch back to Google Assistant, but each time they asked Gemini, it said it can't do that yet!
- ffsm8 2y ago
  > Then why are you using it? I'm not, I pretty much just accepted that Google doesn't care about usability whatsoever and haven't prompted it in a very long time. To be clear, the only time I've ever used it was via "ok Google" in contexts in which I'm unable to interface with the phone directly, i.e while driving. If it doesn't work you'll learn that you can't start driving before queueing the navigation anymore. The voice assistant was a nice feature, but not important enough to waste my time trying to figure out which feature they opted me into and how to get back out of it.
- xur17 2y ago
  In my case it just kinda.. switched over at some point, and frankly I didn't care enough to figure out how I might switch it back (if I even could). I had a similar frustration to GP that it stopped working for 100% of the queries I used to use it for. That said, at some point it started working better, but there was a good 6-12 months where it was a tire fire.
- kyriakos 2y ago

addaon 2y ago

> 95% of everyday AI needs This assumes that the capabilities and use cases are unchanged. Yes, for the AI features available today, I suppose ChatGPT can do much of it -- I wouldn't know because it's not interesting or useful to me, so I don't use it. But: If I'm deciding whether AI features are important to me in making a decision to spend money on a future phone, it's those future AI features that I will be assessing. 95% of my everyday needs for an external intelligence (besides my own) are covered by e-mail, text, and phone calls with other humans, with a trivial portion covered by nascent AI features. As this changes, and AI gets more capable of replacing human intelligence in these interactions (TBD if this happens in the next smartphone generation, or the next human generation, or further in the future), then I will /very much/ care that the electronic device that I use most often day-to-day has access to these capabilities, and will very much use access to those capabilities as part of deciding where to spend my money.

njtransit 2y ago
You seriously assess "future AI features" when buying a phone? Have you heard the expression "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"? Also, what is the lifetime of a phone? How far in the future are these new features expected?
- addaon 2y ago
  No, I assess current AI features when buying a phone, in the future. Any survey about what features customers value in phones they are considering buying inherently ask questions about future behavior, occurring in the future’s present.
HumblyTossed 2y ago
Apple will just tell you you need an iPhone 17 because it has a more special "you're gonna love it" neural thingy onboard, and so your purchase of a 16 is null.

jefftk 2y ago

> the only thing that changed when replacing the "old" Google Assistant with the Gemini-powered one on my Pixel was that it's no longer able to create reminders Weird! Mine can still create reminders, as well as set timers and alarms.

rbanffy 2y ago

AI’s appeal depends a lot on the features. Battery is important for me (more than being anorexically thin), but I would love an AI that could screen my calls like a smart voice mail that asks questions. Also, being able to talk to my mailbox asking questions about subjects mentioned in my e-mails would be a huge time saver. Imagine a purely local Microsoft Recall-like thing that could answer questions about things you saw, or that read the news articles you went over quickly and answer complicated questions about them much later, at a time you just started to regret not having bookmarked it for future reading.

the_arun 2y ago

AI is usually about implementation details. Customers typically worry about solutions to problems. They don't care how solution is implemented - using AI or not.

Terr_ 2y ago

Perhaps a step further: I do not need my phone to tell me an LLM-generated bedtime story involving a specified cast of characters, I just want it to reliably control existing functionality, dangit. Like when a timed alarm is making the phone buzz in my pocket while I'm driving, I'm telling it to silence the alarm, and the response-voice is regretfully informing me that there are no alarms going off right now.