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Right now Alexa+ and Gemini are objectively better. The best is ChatGPT voice mode. It understands non English words and accents amazingly well, and even thoug

by wenc 5mo ago

Right now Alexa+ and Gemini are objectively better. The best is ChatGPT voice mode. It understands non English words and accents amazingly well, and even though the LLM model isn’t the full fledged one, I can have deep conversations with it for an hour without it missing a beat.

barumrho 5mo ago
Siri doesn't need to have conversations with you. ChatGPT can do that. But, it should be able to do actions you'd do on your phone.
- cachius 5mo ago
  Speech to text should work. I regularly have to manually edit the transcribed input. The more special words the more frequent. Completely disregards the context of the current input, for example, on Hacker news might involve special technical and IT vocabulary.
  - nozzlegear 5mo ago
    > Completely disregards the context of the current input, for example, on Hacker news might involve special technical and IT vocabulary. Does any voice assistant do this right now? Genuine question, I don't actually know. It sounds useful as long as it's not invasive.
    - mh- 5mo ago
      Any of the LLM-based ones should pull this* off - so that's to say.. none of the popular commercially available ones, yet? Alexa+ does, but I don't use it for anything except kitchen timers and home automation triggers, so I can't speak to how well it works in a longer conversation. Zoom's meeting notes excels at this, Google Meet is terrible at it. Meet mishears our company name about 90% of the time; various attendee names are a coin toss. * "this" being: context consideration in speech-to-text/transcription.
- skeledrew 5mo ago
  Pretty straight forward on Android at least to wire up a harness that talks to Tasker[0] or another full automation app. [0] https://tasker.joaoapps.com/ https://tasker.joaoapps.com/
  - nozzlegear 5mo ago
    The iOS equivalent would be Shortcuts, which, while not as powerful as Tasker depending on the context, is an official Apple feature that most apps support. Claude and ChatGPT both have various Shortcuts hooks, including voice conversation.
    - mh- 5mo ago
      The experience of having to tell Siri to "Ask ChatGPT <about something>" really sucks, though. It doesn't consistently do it, the handoff frequently just stalls out and you never get a response, the transcription that gets passed to ChatGPT is low quality, etc. And though I have the feature enabled that should cause it to ask ChatGPT about things it can't answer, that works even less frequently. But even if all of these things were true, the stuff on your phone you would expect to be exposed to the model as available tool calls, are not. So their efficacy is very limited. (edit: iPhone 16 Pro Max, if anyone is curious)
      - nozzlegear 5mo ago
        Oh I was just thinking creating a shortcut that you'd tap on your Home Screen/control shade (whatever it's called) to activate ChatGPT, or wire up to the action button. I forgot you can have Siri do the "ask ChatGPT xyz" thing – I agree, that integration sucks.
        mh- 5mo ago
        I'd definitely do the former. I don't even think this is specific to ChatGPT or Claude's apps. There seems to be something about how intents get triggered by Shortcuts on iOS that feels flaky to me. Whenever some app suggests a shortcut (most recently Starbucks promoted a shortcut that orders your "usual"), the success rate when I tap it is <50%. It's possible it's uniquely worse on my device, since I haven't done a "clean install" (vs letting the device upgrade flow copy over) in like a decade. But I'm also not up for dealing with the pain of setting up from scratch just to find out it's bad on a fresh profile, either.
DaiPlusPlus 5mo ago
"objectively better" is a subjective statement :) My preference, however, is for a voice-control UX just like I get with my Amazon Echo and "classic" Alexa like I have been for the past 10 years I've been using it: I think I can best describe it as a "voice-driven command-line" just like your OS' CLI shell, which makes its interactions predictable, even if it means I need to "know" what commands are valid in a given context. We all need predictability and reliability when it comes to my home-automation integrations. ...but computer interaction with a LLM / transformer-driven / "AI agent" is anything but predictable. When Amazon opted everyone into Alexa+ I agreed to give it a go and see if it really made things better or not - and it did not. I opted-out of Alexa+ and went back to something actually reliable.
- ShyCodeGardener 5mo ago
  Whenever I see one of these comments, it's always from someone that tried it at the start and then gave up because of a bad experience. And many times there are more people commenting back that this was essentially the 1.0 version and that the current 2.0 version is much better. So as someone that uses none of these products (old voice assistants vs. ai ones) it's really hard to evaluate if any of these anecdotes mean anything. You could have tried Alexa+ at the start when it was shitty compared to plain Alexa, and maybe it's better now. But equally none of the people that comment that it is "amazing" in its current iteration qualify their statements with their experiences comparing and contrasting the old version vs. the new version making them seem either unqualified to make statements based on how much "better" it is than the old version or at worse they are shills (paid or not). The best take is that they are comparing (e.g.) day-one Alexa+ vs. the current Alexa+ without a comparison to the original Alexa. ... which is to say that it really feels like there are no clear conclusions that could be drawn from all of this.
  - DaiPlusPlus 5mo ago
    > that tried it at the start and then gave up because of a bad experience I've had enough bad experiences with products that never got better, or just got worse (Exhibit A: Windows 11). Like most primates, I am capable of learning, and I've learned that once a consumer product/service goes bad there's little hope of a turn-around. I accept that you're telling me that it's gotten better, but of the people I know IRL who also use an Echo, none of them have told me that Alexa+ is worth trying, let alone committing to. Yes, it's on me for not giving Alexa+ a second chance, but I'm not willing to give Alexa+ a second chance because, as a technology product/service customer, I just don't feel respected by the industry I work for (...lol); if Amazon, Microsoft, Google, et al won't respect me, why should I venture outside my comfort-zone for... what benefit, exactly?
virgil_disgr4ce 5mo ago
I concur that the ChatGPT voice mode is excellent. I can't even think of anything to knock it for other than for whatever reason it never 'hears' my kids, but that's probably because it's not intended to be used in multi-participant chats? But for one-on-one, it is a really outstanding experience. Especially since they tamped down the way over-the-top humanisms.
alfiedotwtf 5mo ago
This! I talk to ChatGPT every morning, and will listen and navigate my feeds while I drive, summarises posts, answer my questions. It just works.
HereticLocke 5mo ago
I agree, ChatGPT voice mode is pretty impressive. Almost similar to Samantha in 'Her', laughably.
- bobthepanda 5mo ago
  Scarlett Johansson is suing OpenAI, in fact
- nozzlegear 5mo ago
  > Almost similar to Samantha in 'Her', laughably. Things that Sam Altman would prefer people not say lol
CountHackulus 5mo ago
Alexa+ has been a massive downgrade for me. It's extremely laggy and constantly misunderstands me, whereas the old one never did. "Set a timer for 20 minutes" used to be instant and just work, I did this the other day and it took 10 seconds to respond and set a timer for 10 minutes.
- hamdingers 5mo ago
  Same here. I can see why LLM-driven voice assistants makes sense to product people in the abstract, but introducing non-deterministic behavior into a device I primarily use to help with timekeeping and control lights is nothing but a regression.
- mh- 5mo ago
  I had the same experience until I upgraded my Echo (we have a few, but the one in the kitchen gets 99% of the voice commands). Just looked it up in my order history: I went from an "Echo Show 5 (1st Gen, 2019 release)" to a "Amazon Echo Show 8 (newest model)". Whether I should have needed to upgrade is a separate question, but, yeah.
stronglikedan 5mo ago
Alexa+ is terrible compared to Alexa. It's so bad that I've dusted off my v1 echos cuz they're too old to run Alexa+. Complete shit show that is. I do like Gemini better than Assistant, even though it's not quite there yet. But that's just a matter of time because they actually designed it from the ground up to be a drop in replacement for Assistant.
acdha 5mo ago
I’m curious, what are you talking about for that long? It sounds like that’s moving out of the home automation space into something else.

by wenc 5mo ago

barumrho 5mo ago

Siri doesn't need to have conversations with you. ChatGPT can do that. But, it should be able to do actions you'd do on your phone.

cachius 5mo ago
Speech to text should work. I regularly have to manually edit the transcribed input. The more special words the more frequent. Completely disregards the context of the current input, for example, on Hacker news might involve special technical and IT vocabulary.
- nozzlegear 5mo ago
  > Completely disregards the context of the current input, for example, on Hacker news might involve special technical and IT vocabulary. Does any voice assistant do this right now? Genuine question, I don't actually know. It sounds useful as long as it's not invasive.
  - mh- 5mo ago
    Any of the LLM-based ones should pull this* off - so that's to say.. none of the popular commercially available ones, yet? Alexa+ does, but I don't use it for anything except kitchen timers and home automation triggers, so I can't speak to how well it works in a longer conversation. Zoom's meeting notes excels at this, Google Meet is terrible at it. Meet mishears our company name about 90% of the time; various attendee names are a coin toss. * "this" being: context consideration in speech-to-text/transcription.
skeledrew 5mo ago
Pretty straight forward on Android at least to wire up a harness that talks to Tasker[0] or another full automation app. [0] https://tasker.joaoapps.com/ https://tasker.joaoapps.com/
- nozzlegear 5mo ago
  The iOS equivalent would be Shortcuts, which, while not as powerful as Tasker depending on the context, is an official Apple feature that most apps support. Claude and ChatGPT both have various Shortcuts hooks, including voice conversation.
  - mh- 5mo ago
    The experience of having to tell Siri to "Ask ChatGPT <about something>" really sucks, though. It doesn't consistently do it, the handoff frequently just stalls out and you never get a response, the transcription that gets passed to ChatGPT is low quality, etc. And though I have the feature enabled that should cause it to ask ChatGPT about things it can't answer, that works even less frequently. But even if all of these things were true, the stuff on your phone you would expect to be exposed to the model as available tool calls, are not. So their efficacy is very limited. (edit: iPhone 16 Pro Max, if anyone is curious)
    - nozzlegear 5mo ago
      Oh I was just thinking creating a shortcut that you'd tap on your Home Screen/control shade (whatever it's called) to activate ChatGPT, or wire up to the action button. I forgot you can have Siri do the "ask ChatGPT xyz" thing – I agree, that integration sucks.
      - mh- 5mo ago
        I'd definitely do the former. I don't even think this is specific to ChatGPT or Claude's apps. There seems to be something about how intents get triggered by Shortcuts on iOS that feels flaky to me. Whenever some app suggests a shortcut (most recently Starbucks promoted a shortcut that orders your "usual"), the success rate when I tap it is <50%. It's possible it's uniquely worse on my device, since I haven't done a "clean install" (vs letting the device upgrade flow copy over) in like a decade. But I'm also not up for dealing with the pain of setting up from scratch just to find out it's bad on a fresh profile, either.

DaiPlusPlus 5mo ago

"objectively better" is a subjective statement :) My preference, however, is for a voice-control UX just like I get with my Amazon Echo and "classic" Alexa like I have been for the past 10 years I've been using it: I think I can best describe it as a "voice-driven command-line" just like your OS' CLI shell, which makes its interactions predictable, even if it means I need to "know" what commands are valid in a given context. We all need predictability and reliability when it comes to my home-automation integrations. ...but computer interaction with a LLM / transformer-driven / "AI agent" is anything but predictable. When Amazon opted everyone into Alexa+ I agreed to give it a go and see if it really made things better or not - and it did not. I opted-out of Alexa+ and went back to something actually reliable.

ShyCodeGardener 5mo ago
Whenever I see one of these comments, it's always from someone that tried it at the start and then gave up because of a bad experience. And many times there are more people commenting back that this was essentially the 1.0 version and that the current 2.0 version is much better. So as someone that uses none of these products (old voice assistants vs. ai ones) it's really hard to evaluate if any of these anecdotes mean anything. You could have tried Alexa+ at the start when it was shitty compared to plain Alexa, and maybe it's better now. But equally none of the people that comment that it is "amazing" in its current iteration qualify their statements with their experiences comparing and contrasting the old version vs. the new version making them seem either unqualified to make statements based on how much "better" it is than the old version or at worse they are shills (paid or not). The best take is that they are comparing (e.g.) day-one Alexa+ vs. the current Alexa+ without a comparison to the original Alexa. ... which is to say that it really feels like there are no clear conclusions that could be drawn from all of this.
- DaiPlusPlus 5mo ago
  > that tried it at the start and then gave up because of a bad experience I've had enough bad experiences with products that never got better, or just got worse (Exhibit A: Windows 11). Like most primates, I am capable of learning, and I've learned that once a consumer product/service goes bad there's little hope of a turn-around. I accept that you're telling me that it's gotten better, but of the people I know IRL who also use an Echo, none of them have told me that Alexa+ is worth trying, let alone committing to. Yes, it's on me for not giving Alexa+ a second chance, but I'm not willing to give Alexa+ a second chance because, as a technology product/service customer, I just don't feel respected by the industry I work for (...lol); if Amazon, Microsoft, Google, et al won't respect me, why should I venture outside my comfort-zone for... what benefit, exactly?

virgil_disgr4ce 5mo ago

I concur that the ChatGPT voice mode is excellent. I can't even think of anything to knock it for other than for whatever reason it never 'hears' my kids, but that's probably because it's not intended to be used in multi-participant chats? But for one-on-one, it is a really outstanding experience. Especially since they tamped down the way over-the-top humanisms.

alfiedotwtf 5mo ago

This! I talk to ChatGPT every morning, and will listen and navigate my feeds while I drive, summarises posts, answer my questions. It just works.

HereticLocke 5mo ago

I agree, ChatGPT voice mode is pretty impressive. Almost similar to Samantha in 'Her', laughably.

bobthepanda 5mo ago
Scarlett Johansson is suing OpenAI, in fact
nozzlegear 5mo ago
> Almost similar to Samantha in 'Her', laughably. Things that Sam Altman would prefer people not say lol

CountHackulus 5mo ago

Alexa+ has been a massive downgrade for me. It's extremely laggy and constantly misunderstands me, whereas the old one never did. "Set a timer for 20 minutes" used to be instant and just work, I did this the other day and it took 10 seconds to respond and set a timer for 10 minutes.

hamdingers 5mo ago
Same here. I can see why LLM-driven voice assistants makes sense to product people in the abstract, but introducing non-deterministic behavior into a device I primarily use to help with timekeeping and control lights is nothing but a regression.
mh- 5mo ago
I had the same experience until I upgraded my Echo (we have a few, but the one in the kitchen gets 99% of the voice commands). Just looked it up in my order history: I went from an "Echo Show 5 (1st Gen, 2019 release)" to a "Amazon Echo Show 8 (newest model)". Whether I should have needed to upgrade is a separate question, but, yeah.

stronglikedan 5mo ago

Alexa+ is terrible compared to Alexa. It's so bad that I've dusted off my v1 echos cuz they're too old to run Alexa+. Complete shit show that is. I do like Gemini better than Assistant, even though it's not quite there yet. But that's just a matter of time because they actually designed it from the ground up to be a drop in replacement for Assistant.

acdha 5mo ago

I’m curious, what are you talking about for that long? It sounds like that’s moving out of the home automation space into something else.