4 ms·

The “play the podcast my wife sent me the other day” example is interesting to me. That shouldn’t be difficult to do without AI. Yeah asking a thing is always g

The “play the podcast my wife sent me the other day” example is interesting to me. That shouldn’t be difficult to do without AI. Yeah asking a thing is always gonna be quicker (provided it works), but a well designed app should make that possible within like ten seconds. I can’t help but wonder if the reason “agentic” systems seem so appealing to people is because as an industry we’ve spent the past fifteen years making software harder to use.

teach 2y ago
I had a similar example the other day. I was visiting Arizona for the first time and was driving in a rental car from Phoenix south to Tucson. I have the latest Google Pixel, and was using Google Maps to navigate. I pressed the "voice search" button from within Google Maps and said "What is the name of the mountain on the left that I'm about to drive past?" Instead of a context-aware answer, my phone simply did a Google search for that exact phrase and showed the results to me. The top hit was a Reddit thread about some mountain near Seattle. :)
- SamBam 2y ago
  I'm wondering if you actually thought that there was a chance that Google Maps was going to answer you correctly? I guess we're entering an age where people might have a reasonable expectation that any app is a context-aware LLM, but personally I don't have that assumption yet.
wat10000 2y ago
I’m not sure. If the word “podcast” wasn’t used then it might be tricky, but an LLM might figure it out from context. It also depends on the context of the action. If you’re sitting in front of your computer, yeah, no big deal. Type “podcast” in the search field of the messages app and click the thing it finds. But if you’re busy cooking dinner or cleaning out the cat box, it’s a pain to get your phone out and poke around. The main draw of voice assistants (at least to me) is that they let you do things quickly when you don’t already have a device in your hands.
xadhominemx 2y ago
The problem is that this only works if your spouse used an apple application to tell you this information. If she used messenger/IG chat/whatsapp or gmail or her work email there’s no way for Siri to know about it.

teach 2y ago

I had a similar example the other day. I was visiting Arizona for the first time and was driving in a rental car from Phoenix south to Tucson. I have the latest Google Pixel, and was using Google Maps to navigate. I pressed the "voice search" button from within Google Maps and said "What is the name of the mountain on the left that I'm about to drive past?" Instead of a context-aware answer, my phone simply did a Google search for that exact phrase and showed the results to me. The top hit was a Reddit thread about some mountain near Seattle. :)

SamBam 2y ago
I'm wondering if you actually thought that there was a chance that Google Maps was going to answer you correctly? I guess we're entering an age where people might have a reasonable expectation that any app is a context-aware LLM, but personally I don't have that assumption yet.

wat10000 2y ago

I’m not sure. If the word “podcast” wasn’t used then it might be tricky, but an LLM might figure it out from context. It also depends on the context of the action. If you’re sitting in front of your computer, yeah, no big deal. Type “podcast” in the search field of the messages app and click the thing it finds. But if you’re busy cooking dinner or cleaning out the cat box, it’s a pain to get your phone out and poke around. The main draw of voice assistants (at least to me) is that they let you do things quickly when you don’t already have a device in your hands.

xadhominemx 2y ago

The problem is that this only works if your spouse used an apple application to tell you this information. If she used messenger/IG chat/whatsapp or gmail or her work email there’s no way for Siri to know about it.