[HN Gopher] Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech
___________________________________________________________________
Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech
Author : rntn
Score : 241 points
Date : 2022-11-23 09:33 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| derN3rd wrote:
| I personally use Alexa for some light control as well as smart
| blinds I have installed. Sometimes some basic questions ("What is
| XY?") and besides that nothing more.
|
| The amount of wrong answers or just telling me something it has
| found on the web, which has nothing today with the topic is just
| annoying. Even basic questions seem to not work reliably and
| looking at the whole Alexa ecosystem it doesn't even feel close
| to "smart" home.
|
| Lack of context awareness, connection to basic things like parcel
| delivery, washing machine and similar that would make my life a
| little easier (because I'm to lazy to open an app to look when my
| parcels will arrive or when the washing machine will finish) just
| ruin the whole thing for me.
|
| Besides that, I've tried setting the male voice, but for some
| responses it just switches back to female Alexa??
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Well there are so any problems with it (Siri).
|
| 1) Doesn't always understand what I'm saying (voice recognition)
|
| 2) If it does understand (voice recognition), it actually changes
| it it something else (super dumb, no, idiotic "AI", changes
| someone I call almost daily into someone I never call)
|
| 3) If it asks me what I want to do with a contact, it doesn't
| understand "call"
|
| 4) There's no way to 'correct' what has been said.
|
| 5) I can't open "podcasts", because it will open Deezer (I don't
| use Deezer anymore, but it's still on my phone).
|
| It's really just really really a dumb command line interface. And
| if it would just be that without the 'smart' things, it would be
| a lot more helpful. There are only a few things I use it for:
|
| 1) Call XXX
|
| 2) Alarm at XXX
|
| 3) Open google maps. Sometimes I say "route to xxx using google
| maps", and that works
|
| Even these three common use cases fail about 10-20% of the time.
|
| When I'm in the car and want to change route or add a poi, want
| to open an app, or text something, I try, but I get so frustrated
| which is more distracting than just typing it in your phone. So
| that's what I do.
|
| Google's voice recognition is a lot better and faster. Also their
| search understands more context.
|
| Voice assistants are like a skinner experiment. Solution: make it
| very rigid in terms of operations. People are quick to adapt
| this. Somehow the ai-crowd doesn't understand that a UI works
| best when the things you operate with are at the same location
| and always respond and work in the same way.
|
| I'd compare the voice assistant experiment as a GUI where the
| buttons, their function, and labels always change.
| eschneider wrote:
| I find Siri mostly useful for things like taking messages and
| playing music when my hands and eyes are occupied with other
| things, but as many people have pointed out, figuring out what
| exactly one has to say to get Siri to do it's thing is often
| hard, even when you realize you've got a parsing problem. I mean,
| ever try to get Siri to play a song by "Them"? Unpossible by band
| name. :/ What I wouldn't do for a manual or keyword guide...
| shellfishgene wrote:
| I've had Google home for quite a while now, and, apparently like
| everyone else, I only really use it to start and stop music, as a
| kitchen timer, and to make animal noises when kids are visiting.
| There was no obvious improvement over the years. However with
| GPT3, DALL-E and all the other amazing stuff coming out I had
| just assumed Google/Amazon must be working on a big update that
| really makes Assistant/Alexa 10 fold better. Is this hope in
| vain?
| jfoster wrote:
| They're half-baked and I sense consumers starting to lose
| interest. Third party developers have to do a big deal with
| Amazon to have a "skill", rather than having an open marketplace
| where consumers can choose what their device will do? The devices
| don't really cover all the things consumers might want from them.
| Years ago, I had assumed Google or Amazon would launch a
| marketplace akin to Google Play and whoever got there first would
| be the category winner. Instead, the category became a race to
| the bottom. Big tech cynically chasing the big deals rather than
| opening up the platforms.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| The harsh reality is that the AI powering those assistants is
| simply not smart enough to converse with.
|
| Using voice to send commands to a machine is not practical or
| pleasant for everyone.
|
| This should not be a surprise and it could have been easily
| predicted, but hype and FOMO pushed big companies to sink
| billions into this tech.
|
| This is not the first time, and it will happen again, especially
| because anything touching AI leads to highly inflated/magical
| expectations.
| ozzythecat wrote:
| This is an interesting thread :)
|
| I see lots of conjecture on the nature of voice assistants, or
| why they haven't taken off.
|
| As someone who was at Amazon, and close to this area, let me
| offer a simpler explanation.
|
| Alexa has stagnated because its leadership has little to no
| direction. The incentive structure driving the product teams and
| tech falls under two categories: 1. rest and vest 2. or write
| documents to build your promotion portfolio and get promoted.
| Then leave the org to find a job in AWS.
|
| In fact, Alexa could be used as a text book study in empire
| building.
|
| * Myriad teams that maintain or increase head count each year,
| with absolutely no meaningful deliverables.
|
| * Services that could be maintained by a 2-3 person on call that
| have an entire team of 6-8 engineers.
|
| * Tech directors, Sr. SDMs, and SDMs in a race to build their
| empire to get promoted to the next level. SDMs solemnly hiring
| head count for the sake of having more reports. Other SDMs hiring
| SDMs below them, even though there's no need for additional
| management (team is idle), so they can show a larger footprint
| and get promoted to the next level.
|
| Voice assistant tech may as well be hitting a brick wall for
| technical or human computer interaction gaps that need to be
| thought much more in depth. But saying this was just an insanely
| hard technical problem is misleading and missing the bigger
| picture.
|
| If you build an organization as a pet project and then throw
| money at it to do whatever the hell it likes, with practically no
| accountability, of course you won't get meaningful results.
|
| In recent years, Alexa became a place to chill and wait for your
| RSUs to vest. I personally know great engineers in Alexa, who are
| now stressed out of their mind about their work and visa
| situation because of the layoffs. But look - you decided to join
| a team where you basically just hang out at work, have a series
| of useless meetings, or half the time, your manager is
| complaining for some reason that his team doesn't all show up to
| daily stand ups. A ton of extremely talented folks became
| extremely lazy, and so here we are.
|
| To root cause: misaligned incentives, lack of accountability and
| a poor work ethic, shockingly poor given at least some other
| parts of the company are still on the other, opposite extreme.
| aflag wrote:
| The main issue for me is that they are not stateful. Perhaps the
| main thing in the role of an assistant is to keep state. You want
| someone or something that understands you and what you want, so
| that you don't have to put too much thought into it.
|
| If you tell it you want more coffee, it should know what you like
| and suggest a mixture of brands you bought before and new ones
| you may enjoy. If you tell it you're hungry, depending on the
| time of day it could suggest you some takeaway you've ordered
| previously or something else you may like. If you say the same
| some other time it may suggest recipes based on what you have at
| home or it may suggest nearby restaurants. It should keep track
| of your friends and otherwise and tell you when their birthdays
| are coming and it would be nice if it could even suggest some
| presents based on things you've told the assistant before, or
| their wishlist on amazon or something else.
|
| There are a lot of things assistants could do, but it needs to
| know you. The model where everyone has the same assistant doesn't
| quite work out.
| somehnacct3757 wrote:
| Complicating the situation is that I don't trust any of the
| companies making virtual assistants with this level of personal
| data; so the first thing I do on a new device is block the
| assistant's access to my location or any other behavior
| learning functionalities.
| boplicity wrote:
| I think that lack of trust is the single biggest factor
| holding back this technology.
|
| I imagine that a truly top-notch virtual assistant would
| always be listening and aware of your behavior and context.
| However, the level of trust required for such monitoring is
| usually reserved only for one or two people in our lives, and
| even then, it's quite incomplete awareness on their part.
|
| I don't know how a for-profit company can reconcile this
| disconnect, though I imagine that someone will eventually
| try.
| rubyfan wrote:
| I believe tech companies are aware of the creepiness factor
| associated with surprising customers with too much context
| about them. I think they cripple some of the more context
| aware features that they could be doing because it draws a
| lot of attention on just how much data they have about you.
| aflag wrote:
| That could maybe be gradually introduced like that story
| about the frog which doesn't feel the water getting warm.
| What put people off is having it knowing everything up
| ahead through inference on data you were not even aware you
| had shared.
|
| Instead, you could go easy, by first suggestint the user to
| set up your assistant by linking it to amazon,
| deliveroo/uber eats/etc, facebook, and verbally sharing
| information as it asks. Then, over time, it could spread
| its inference further and further and you won't be sure or
| not if you already shared that information or not, but you
| will just assume you did, as you share everything anyway.
| For people who are not so open, it could stick to inferring
| less and being less useful.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I would want a company where I pay them for their
| assistant, knowing that everything it holds is not shared
| with anyone and completely under my control.
|
| The issue is of course, like paying for youtube, is
| consumers will wonder why they would want to pay for an
| assistant.
| rubyfan wrote:
| The market for something you pay for is small. The market
| for free things is seemingly never ending.
| ghaff wrote:
| >creepiness factor
|
| This is a complicated social construct even with people. If
| a public relations person (or whoever in a professional
| context) reaches out to me, I hope they've done some basic
| research on what my interests are. I saw you were at
| $CONFERENCE last month? Sure, probably. Start asking me
| about my vacation last month that they found photos from on
| Flickr? Probably getting over a line if I don't know them.
| hadrien01 wrote:
| Cortana on Windows Phone had a "notebook" of everything it had
| learned and you could modify it to your liking. For example it
| detected my home and work locations and transit hours and
| displayed every weekday at 17h15 bus information before I left,
| and I could modify that info if it was wrong.
| aflag wrote:
| Google also identifies commute, it's actually a maps feature
| and not the assistant's, though.
| est wrote:
| Yeah I wanted something like a "voice notes" like I gave my
| kids credit scores to see who earns the most each weak, I want
| my smart speaker to have a simple voice activated k-v store
| ready, can increase or decrease, get and reset.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Yeah, cuz it's not 2011 anymore...
|
| Kids in India have smartphones now, no one's impressed
| omega3 wrote:
| "Someone has to say it:" It's weird that they are pretending to
| do some cutting edge/against-the-grain journalism/research in
| this article.
| [deleted]
| anothernewdude wrote:
| I'd be full on board for a voice assistant, but I control the
| server and the traffic, so Amazon is a non-starter.
| draugadrotten wrote:
| Try https://mycroft.ai/
| rndmio wrote:
| Conversational interfaces just aren't any good, and until they're
| perfect they won't be useful. The primary issue I've seen (having
| worked with slack bots) is discoverability, how do you find out
| what a bot can do without asking lots of open questions? The most
| useful bots I saw were those that didn't try to be
| conservsational but had a fixed grammar for commands and
| questions (along with a good help response). And at least with
| chatbots you've got the textual context you can scroll back on
| and read as opposed to trying to keep track of what's happening
| in a conversation with a non human who you can't see.
| robg wrote:
| Love the utility, but there's clearly little business value.
| Great example where "making something people want" doesn't alone
| support the bottomline.
| rmac wrote:
| They did take off. Everyone in here uses them. People all over
| are using transcription (speech to text) to dictate instead of
| typing on the terribly small mobile phone keyboards.
|
| The issue apparently is no one knows how to make money
| pgrote wrote:
| Alexa is an important tool for our family. My hope is amazon
| doesn't abandon Alex, but limit what it does and charge a
| subscription. We use it for alarms, timers, drop ins (inside home
| and outside), announcements, weather, news, music on Amazon prime
| and making calls. Simple things that don't require add on skills
| or advanced commands. Works solid for our needs and it would be
| difficult to replace. We never buy anything using voice commands.
|
| The problem is a family like us. We haven't bought a new device
| in 2 years and still use some of the original pucks. Amazon will
| need to make money somehow so I think a yearly subscription would
| work. Then again, if it isn't a growth segment I cannot see a
| tech company keeping something in today's world.
| ghaff wrote:
| For me, subscriptions need to really earn their keep. I suppose
| I'd miss my devices if Amazon started charging a subscription,
| but I certainly wouldn't pay and maybe I'd replace them with
| something else simpler.
| nunodonato wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33662020
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I wish voice assistants like Siri could just do functions that
| are obvious, even if it requires learning commands. Actually
| especially for in-car voice assistants. I should be able to do
| any of the critical commands like turning on wipers, etc, via
| voice commands without looking at a screen or even feeling around
| for tactile controls with a free hand. If this was reliable and
| consistent, even if being reliable required learning a list of
| commands, that'd be a big help while driving.
| jacooper wrote:
| Good, I hate these spyware devices.
| pmontra wrote:
| I'm really not surprised. Some sample items I bought in the last
| months in order of difficulty both for me and (I think) for a
| voice assistant:
|
| 1. Hey Alexa/Google/Whatever, buy me a saddle, Selle Italia SMP
| Extra, white. I expect to get a proposal for the best price +
| shipment and that's it. Easy.
|
| 2. Buy me a replacement head for my Parktool pump. Oops, it's a
| PFP-3 pump. Ah, the shop selling the saddle doesn't have one... I
| eventually discovered that that shop has an identical part for a
| pump of a different brand, probably the same Chinese
| manufacturer. I think this would be hard for an assistant,
| borderline to impossible.
|
| 3. Buy me a magnetic mosquito screen of at least X x Y cm, not
| adhesive or velcro. Oops, I need a frame to mount it on? I spare
| you with the discoveries I made along the process. Either the
| voice assistant is equivalent to a professional installer and can
| see my door or I'll always do a search with a browser, and watch
| many videos too.
| userabchn wrote:
| They may not be very useful at the moment, but if progress in
| large language models continues at the current pace then I can
| imagine that conversational AI might be useful in several years.
| Investments by companies to establish and maintain voice
| assistant market share might thus eventually pay off.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Perhaps it would be a useful experiment to pick a representative
| group, couple them to real human assistants with complete control
| to complete requests and collect all the requests that are made.
| ggm wrote:
| Voice assistants are shit. The number of times my friends have
| got alexa to turn the light on first time is functionally zero.
|
| And, they don't really explain the syntax constraints. Which are
| massive.
|
| Try ab initio without knowing how to do it, to get OK google to
| open an arbitrary google authored app and direct it to do
| something. Compared to learning how to use the OS UI keyboard
| shortcuts or applescript. (Which btw like Windows is basically
| fully documented because all the libraries are self documenting
| for their call structures)
|
| The voice interfaces are universally badly designed because
| spoken command sentences are not well understood as a modality of
| command, distinct from mouse, gesture, touch or keyboard.
|
| Until voice is baked in with a documented syntax in "man" format,
| i won't believe its first class.
|
| How do I even know for any arbitrary app what voice directives it
| uses? How do they correlate to any other command input? How
| consistent is this with other commands in other apps? Does "stop
| now" always mean the same thing between a mapping routing app,
| and a tape backup app? Isn't "stop" contextually defined in a way
| ^C isn't?
| eternityforest wrote:
| I bet you could sell a lot of fully offline voice assistants
| that just did timers and maybe reminders that sync to the phone
| or other smart speakers with bluetooth. No privacy concern if
| there's no WiFi at all!
|
| I'll stick to Google assistant for the extra occasionally
| useful stuff, but the idea of a device that won't stop working
| if the server goes away is pretty cool.
| zamalek wrote:
| > The number of times my friends have got alexa to turn the
| light on first time is functionally zero.
|
| Do your friends have accents? Alexa frequently fucks up due to
| my South African/Zimbabwean accent. I joke that Alexa is
| racist. Google seems to handle it _way_ better. Here 's hoping
| that Mycroft does better (which I plan to switch to in the
| coming months).
| dmitriid wrote:
| > The number of times my friends have got alexa to turn the
| light on first time is functionally zero.
|
| I have a room called "Study" and the only lights there are
| called "Main Lights".
|
| - Hey, Siri, study lights 100%
|
| - Did you mean these lights: "Study: Main Lights"
|
| :facepalm:
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| I don't disagree with the stupidity sometimes but I have
| probably upwards of 50 lightsbulbs/plugs connected to my echo
| speakers and use them exclusively for turning on my lamps,
| dimming lights etc. so I can say confidently, it makes
| mistakes sometimes but once you learn the quirks and set
| things up with proper names it's actually pretty impressive.
| And you can learn the oddities, you just have to be
| dedicated, sorta like learning anything else.
|
| I've learned that I can't say "what's the temperature"
| because it will tell me the temperature my Dyson fan is set
| to lol. It's not wrong, it's just missing some context (me
| holding my jacket wondering if I should wear it) that I can
| provide going forward. Maybe I should just ask it "should I
| wear my jacket today"
| dmitriid wrote:
| That's the issue though: there are too many quirks even for
| the most simple of interactions.You have to be constantly
| aware of quirks, and issues, and workarounds. It's like
| walking on broken glass.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > set things up with proper names
|
| The hard part isn't naming the stuff, its remembering what
| each thing is named. I could call the lamp next to the
| couch several different things depending on the context. If
| you don't remember _exactly_ what it is named you are gonna
| have a rough time. I 've been tempted to just put a label
| with the device name on everything controlled by Alexa.
|
| And good luck getting a guest to turn anything on or off.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > I could call the lamp next to the couch several
| different things depending on the context.
|
| Or just call it dude :) https://reddit.com/r/tumblr/comme
| nts/548b3p/everything_is_du...
| ggm wrote:
| Yea, a single member set shouldn't require full enumeration,
| it's detectably the only operating device in context.
|
| If it was the only "main light" across all rooms I'd hesitate
| to say the same mind you, nesting scopes should be respected.
|
| What would you want it to do when you add a second light
| bulb? Tell you the old command is no longer unique or turn on
| both?
| dmitriid wrote:
| > What would you want it to do when you add a second light
| bulb? Tell you the old command is no longer unique or turn
| on both?
|
| I think when the command is generic "lights" it should turn
| on all lights. But both are valid behaviours.
| kozikow wrote:
| I have voice assistant for a few years (Google Home). I tried to
| use it for many things, but in the end I settled only for playing
| music, setting alarm, find my phone, what's the time, and "what
| sound does a monkey make" when I am holding a baby.
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| "consumers were just as happy to sit down and click away until
| they had the basket they wanted" -- same reason why although many
| people hate lifting their butt to go shopping, some would happily
| do. Nobody likes checkout lines though, that's universal.
| harshaw wrote:
| There is a monetization path, but not likely easy like selling
| direct to consumers. As others have commented - voice (and google
| glass!!) are useful when you don't have hands. For example, a
| dentist frequently needs to look at the computer screen or have
| the computer screen change a display while they are in the chair
| working on a patient. Making a command via voice seems useful
| (change to the next screen, etc) and/or also potentially showing
| some data in a heads up display. Another vertical could be
| hospital - being able to use a generic voice UI to turn on the
| lights and summon help seems useful.
|
| Is the monetization path hard - yes. Trying to break into
| specific industries takes a ton of work. Additionally - you
| already have staff in these cases. Would a dentist get rid of her
| assistant for some voice commands? not likely. A hospital still
| needs nurses.
| totalhack wrote:
| My favorite part is when my Google Home stops the music upon my
| request and then tells me in a complete and unnecessary sentence
| that it has stopped the music.
| thrwawy74 wrote:
| What annoys me the most is this:
|
| "Hey Google, turn off the den light switch in 30 minutes"
|
| "Sorry, for safety reasons we cannot...."
|
| It's a light. Because it heard "switch" it thinks there might be
| some power tool connected to it and won't let me set delayed
| actions. I want to be intelligent with it like "Hey Google, turn
| turn the lights on when the sun comes up everday" but no one has
| gone to that next step.
|
| Or how about "Hey Google, turn off the tone played when you say
| Hey Google". These settings aren't accessible from the voice
| interface itself.
|
| Can't wait for Alexa to fail so my SmartTV will stop nagging me
| to use integrations I will never use. Anti-competitive but
| whatevs.
| joncrocks wrote:
| I think you can set 'routines' now, might be able to help with
| sunrise actions -
| https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/7672035?hl=en-GB...
| thethethethe wrote:
| You can change the device type in Google home to work around
| the scheduling issue
| twelvedogs wrote:
| some of the stuff google don't put effort into is super weird,
| like the whole if the device is in a different "room" it has to
| loudly announce what it's doing but if it's in the same room it
| turns down the volume on all of the devices for 10 seconds
|
| really makes me think they almost want to discontinue it but
| it's so integrated with android and the chromecast they can't
| really kill it
| JamesGriffin wrote:
| U
| licebmi__at__ wrote:
| At least for my family, the voice recognition seems to be getting
| worse and worse with each update. Nowadays google doesn't seem to
| turn off the alarms or the music after several tries so my son
| just comes and unplugs it (touch controls are also a fucking
| mystery), my wife tries to make her phone ring so many times she
| can find without help in the meantime. Alexa doesn't understand
| what I try to order and it's easier to just find my phone and
| type it. I thought that somehow the devices were just having
| physical issues with time, but even a new one has the same
| problems. So far it seems like I would get a better experience by
| rolling my own stuff and training it with our specific voices.
| OtomotO wrote:
| I feel like voice assistants sound super awesome in theory and a
| lot of nerds, me included,first think about "Computer, replicate
| me some Wiener Schnitzel", but reality is really something
| completely different, even when ignoring the replication part.
| albertzeyer wrote:
| Following the argument that the biggest problem is natural
| language understanding, I wonder what happens when you put in
| some GPT3-like model, give it all relevant context like past
| conversations, other user information, etc. That should be much
| more capable in understanding what the user wants than current
| systems.
|
| There are obviously still many open research questions. Like how
| this is then combined with actually performing the commands. But
| there are also solutions to this.
|
| This is still somewhat open active research. But given such
| powerful models, I think in principle we could make such devices
| much more useful.
| OtomotO wrote:
| I use voice assistants for one task:
|
| Setting a timer.
|
| The oven is in another area of the house, so when I come back to
| squeeze in some work, I often just said " _Voice Assistant_ , set
| a timer for 10 minutes!"
|
| And that's about it.
|
| Apart from that I worked on some chat-bots in the past and it's
| the very same thing to me, just even a bit worse because of
| audio.
|
| Natural language processing simply isn't there AND there is just
| a few very niche use cases in my eyes.
|
| So if they go away again, I won't cry or rather my tears will dry
| fast.
| headsoup wrote:
| Perhaps what value they're getting out of voice services is not
| what you think it is.
|
| Data, training, pattern recognition, language.
| Sakos wrote:
| But then you have news articles talking about how Alexa lost
| $10 billion and I'm wondering if these companies even know what
| they're getting out of it.
| JCM9 wrote:
| I'd argue this space was technically successfully but not
| commercially so. We love our "smart speakers" and have integrated
| them into home automation. Does anyone make any money when we use
| them? No.
| jleyank wrote:
| Admittedly I only skimmed the comments but "how will they make
| money from it?" wasn't acknowledged. Hell of a lot of effort to
| build up an inference engine for natural language processing and
| they're going to want to profit from it. Unless, as some have
| noted, surveillance will be their funding.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I find it perplexing that voice assistants actually seem worse at
| basic functions than they were ten years ago. I remember being
| amazed how well it could interpret requests to set reminders with
| flexible language options. Now google gets it wrong so often I've
| nearly stopped using it.
| 2sk21 wrote:
| Despite the tremendous amount of effort that's gone into creating
| large language models, there is still no way to hold a goal-
| directed conversation with voice assistants. There is a lot of
| implicit context in normal human speech that needs to be inferred
| or clarified. None of these speech assistants can do handle
| anything more than the most rudimentary clarification dialog.
| djhworld wrote:
| I bought the original Echo back when it first came out.
|
| It was a neat internet radio device and Bluetooth speaker but
| outside of making it play the radio I never really used the voice
| functionality much.
|
| I remember one of the places where I buy groceries from offering
| an incentive if you ordered your shopping via the Alexa skill, it
| was so painful to use that I added everything to my basket using
| the website and then just added 1 unambiguous item using the
| skill and checked out. They gave me the discount/incentive but I
| never used it again.
|
| I moved house but never plugged it back in and don't really miss
| it.
|
| I also remember going to AWS re:invent in 2016 and they gave
| every attendee an echo dot, with a lot of fanfare to encourage
| Devs to make skills. I tried to make one but it was so
| convoluted, I gave up in the end and just gave the Dot to my
| parents. It broke after about a year, they never replaced it
| either
| [deleted]
| nmca wrote:
| What's entertaining is that they were just too soon. Give it at
| the very most a couple more years and the state of the field will
| be very, very interesting.
| asim wrote:
| They were too early. A decade from now when NLP is bullet proof
| and AI has made significant advances we'll revisit this.
| Pragmatically it makes sense at this juncture to focus on the API
| behind the voice interface that lets you issue commands. That's
| the true power. That's effectively a global catalog of services
| that can do anything, driven through one API. We can revisit
| voice but this is where the starting line is IMO.
| jhoelzel wrote:
| I think, or at least for me, one of the major frustration points
| with voice ai is how dumb it has been for the last two decades.
|
| When you tell a mercedes navigate me to "exact road and adress"
| it barely gets half of it right. and usually that just the
| number.
|
| Now i don't have a speech impairement and have tried in 3
| languages, none of them work to my sophistication.
|
| The worst thing though, personally, is all the shitty patents
| around voice activation keywords. It's disgusting.
|
| Finally i am also an IOT guy with a lot of toys, and i would have
| written my own personal assistant if it would not be for the
| patents. After all the hardware is surprisingly cheap.
|
| All the problems are solved too. but if you believe i would write
| free code for megacorp amazon without pay, you might be heavily
| mistaken.
| imdsm wrote:
| As Shank said, there needs to be a GPT element to voice
| assistants. At the moment, Alexa is a voice interface, but is
| "dumb" essentially, there's no understanding, intonation, memory,
| etc. A voice assistant that would would be a fully fledged AI
| that grows over time, as with most Sci Fi smart houses. I think
| it's possible -- that we'll receive units that have base AIs that
| then grow with time, but we're not there yet, not close. The
| current problem with GPT-like AIs is that you can't trust what
| they're going to say. They're interesting, useful, but there
| still lacks that feeling that it's anything except mathematical
| probability based auto-completion.
| kybernetyk wrote:
| Voice assistants are infuriating. Every day I feel like Siri and
| Alexa would understand less and becoming worse.
| taviso wrote:
| I got into the habit of asking things like "what is the weather
| like today" every morning before work, it worked fine for
| months and I quite liked it - while I'm occupied with something
| else it can give me some useful information. Then one day it
| started giving me the dictionary definition of the word
| "weather". That continued for over a week, so I just lost the
| habit and don't think I've really used it since.
| eunos wrote:
| Now this is not the most politically correct statement. But I
| wonder what is the similar situation say in China or other major
| non west countries? I think in China voice AI is more hyped.
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| I don't like the centralized nature of them.
|
| If I could download it and run it on a private server in the
| basement, without any ties to the cloud, and with my own settings
| for privacy, then I'd be more willing to use the things.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Same. I actually really enjoy using it for basic functions but
| I am too concerned about privacy to use one for anything more
| advanced. I don't know if I would ever trust a Siri or Alexa or
| Google Assistant even if they claimed to work offline because
| all providers have had a terrible track record. If the Linux
| Foundation or reputable open source project had a solid open
| source solution that promised to work 80% as well and had a
| fairly straightforward installer, then I'd be more apt to
| interact with it regularly. One other issue I've found with
| Alexa and others is their integration with proprietary lock-in
| ecosystems for calendars, reminders, lists, etc. Ideally with
| an open source solution you could do things like set a write
| only calendar that uses your CalDav calendar and CardDav for
| contacts, or some non-invasive solution for messaging and
| calling.
| troyvit wrote:
| Mycroft.ai has some of what you need. They still host some
| functionality but it's on their road map to make their voice
| assistant offline capable.
| sramsay wrote:
| This is exactly how I feel. On the one hand, this technology
| seems completely miraculous (I remember watching Star Trek TNG
| back in the day and thinking the "computer" was about the
| coolest thing imaginable).
|
| Now it's here, it works amazing well (considering what it's
| doing), and . . . I'm talking to Apple, Google, and Amazon? No
| thanks . . .
| craigmcnamara wrote:
| No matter how free they make it to use, I just do not want a
| robot listening to me all time.
| twstdzppr wrote:
| Muahahaha, there's no escape! Maybe dial down the paranoia.
| It's a bit unhealthy.
| corobo wrote:
| I hope this means people will be looking at jailbreaking these
| devices. I'd do it myself but that stuff is beyond me at this
| time.
|
| I'd love to repurpose my Alexas into satellite Rhasspy[1] devices
| if Alexa retires.
|
| 1: on HN the other day
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33705938
|
| & direct link to the satellite info
| https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/#server-w...
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| My hot take is this is the start of vastly (better/worse)
| surveillance- that can be a force for good or bad. Let's start
| with business meetings - the tech is close enough to be able to
| record, transcribe and summarise all decisions and action points
| - which sounds great and may get put into place. Then it can
| assess how well a manager was "coaching" the meeting - getting
| appropriate feedback from all participants - then were all
| necessary participants there ? Then we can see training sessions
| geared specifically towards manager A and their problem in
| encouraging positive performance from their team with vague
| goals.
|
| Wouldn't we all like better managers with clearer goals?
|
| Roll this out to a doctors bedside manner, or the mistaken
| command given to a nurse that was a perhaps misheard and the
| wrong medicine given
|
| or ...
|
| We can surveil all our waking lives - and almost the only thing
| social sciences get right is large population statistics- we can
| find out who leads happiest best lives and be taught how to do it
| better.
|
| Or we can stomp out individuality and live on a totalitarian
| nightmare.
|
| But we don't get to not play the game
| cik wrote:
| I've been using these ever since they came out. I've tried..
| enough of them, including the open source, self hosted things. I
| have a tonne of them all over the place, and after almost 8 years
| of this, here are all of my use cases. To be clear, I just don't
| get why people care:
|
| 1. Play me music or a podcast (this fails a shockingly high
| amount)
|
| 2. Call person X
|
| 3. Covert unit to unit
|
| 4. Turn devices on or off
|
| 5. Timer set
|
| 6. Reminder set
|
| 7. What time does Shabbat (my Sabbath) start.
|
| All of the above can be done with my phone, so there's really no
| point in them - for me.
| locusofself wrote:
| I have a stereo pair of OG homepods, and it never ceases to amaze
| me how stupid they are. Songs I played yesterday are mysteriously
| unavailable, or I'll ask for a song I've played a million times
| for my daughter and it will decide to play a totally different,
| highly innapropriate rap song just because it also has the word
| "toothbrush" in the title or something.
|
| I use my Alexa as a timer only, and when it started saying things
| to me like I have notifications or "did you know you can use
| Alexa to order such and such" when I would say "Alexa, stop the
| timer", I almost threw it out the window.
| transfire wrote:
| Well guess what happens without open platforms? We need open tech
| to allow anyone to create voice driven "skills" -- like websites.
|
| Not everything can live on ad dollars.
| PeterCorless wrote:
| Has anyone also considered that people have voice recognition
| systems in their smartphone and thus a standalone voice
| recognition device isn't necessary?
|
| Or that the results on a smartphone can be visual, whereas these
| home devices don't have direct IO apart from voice? [And yes,
| while they can be hooked to exogenous devices like a television,
| that's an extra step of configuration to finagle...]
| antirez wrote:
| It's not the technology. Voice transcription works great, and
| from the point of view of extracting meaning, even pattern
| matching would do better than the embarassing failure of today's
| voice assistants. It's a matter of product. We are living in an
| IT world where there are no great people able to turn the
| technological potential into useful things.
| ggerganov wrote:
| I agree, but I think things will likely change soon. The main
| thing holding progress in this field seems to be privacy issues
| and sending data to the cloud. However, we already have human-
| level voice transcription that you can run on a low-to-moderate
| hardware at home, so all it takes is for the average developer
| to be able to run GPT-like LLMs on their machine. At this point
| I think the quality will improve really fast.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Computer, earl grey, hot.
| ericol wrote:
| This (for me) just shows a normal trend in tech.
|
| Somebody develops something, gets a lot of buzz, doesn't deliver,
| buzz dies slowly, and then several years in the future somebody
| else actually builds the tech stack needed for it, and it takes
| off again.
|
| Voice assistance, chat robots [1]... the metaverse.
|
| [1] Several years back I attended a chat in my city where some
| people from IBM showed us how to implement a chatbot I think with
| Watson.
|
| Beyond the trivial examples, it was nearly impossible to
| implement anything (Or the people giving the chat didn't know how
| to implement those) but the documentation was nowhere to be found
| beyond those trivial examples.
| nailer wrote:
| I use Alexa on a house filled with Sonos speakers every day. She
| barely works and is the worst advertisement for Amazon.
|
| "Alexa turn on my FireTV" (doesn't work, weirdly FireTV and Alexa
| speakers don't seem to get along)
|
| "Alexa play The Killers" (responds with "Playing the killers on
| Spotify" then silence)
|
| "Alexa play The Killers on Spotify" (works)
|
| "Alexa play The Killers" (sometimes tells me to start scanning
| devices and install a skill for Sonos)
|
| "Alexa wikipedia 'history of Bulgaria'" (works but asks me if I
| want to continue after every sentence, so I give up)
|
| "Alexa stop" (doesn't stop for some apps, Amazon should have
| support for silencing as a minimum requirement for apps and
| implement worst-case scenarios if an app doesn't respond to stop
| in time)
|
| "Alexa rewind 30 seconds" (doesn't rewind for some apps, Amazon
| should have support for rewinding played recordings as a minimum
| requirement for apps)
| Crosseye_Jack wrote:
| My issue with trying to use voice assistants to purchase items
| for me is that I've found the experience not that great when
| doing so and had to resort to using my phone/computer anyway, so
| it wasn't really worth it for something other than adding an item
| to my cart as a reminder that I wanted to purchase that item when
| I wasn't at my desk.
|
| For me, the utility I get out of my echos are home automation
| control to control heating, lighting, audio when my hands are
| full or their control are out of reach. But you are never going
| to make a fortune out of house voice control when you sell the
| voice assistants at or near cost (don't think I've ever paid full
| price of any of my Echo's, and I tell people considering getting
| on to wait till they go on sale as Amazon always seem to be
| offering a deal/discount on them every few weeks.
|
| But what does frustrate me if that Amazon don't seem to uniformly
| "monetise" things across the Alexa platform, for example when I
| found out about the Samuel Jackson voice for Alexa I wanted to
| buy it even if it was just a novelty, but it's not available in
| the U.K.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Just don't think they have improved in any meaningful way since
| launch and in fact some of the experiences have gotten worse.
|
| At launch I could reliably "Hey Siri" a timer across the room,
| now it just doesn't work because presumably Apple have downgraded
| the long range microphone tech at some point to save costs.
|
| Eventually just stopped bothering and just set them manually.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Speaking to a voice assistant is like speaking to a toddler. They
| have limited vocabulary, limited comprehension and limited
| ability to perform what you've asked them. The only difference is
| that a toddler stops being a toddler after a year or so, while
| voice assistants stay perpetually dumb.
| mordymoop wrote:
| A huge source of subjective user frustration with voice
| assistants is the lack of responsiveness to both commands and
| interruptions.
|
| Siri in particular will wait as long as a full second to "ding"
| letting you know she's ready to process a command ... often
| interrupting your attempt to give the command. Alexa will very
| often fail to hear me say "Alexa" despite the audio conditions
| being quite favorable.
|
| Both Siri and Alexa will misunderstand what you asked for and be
| completely indifferent to your attempts to correct them unless
| you interrupt them _correctly._ Afaict Siri can't be interrupted
| by voice alone and Alexa can only be interrupted by something
| starting with "Alexa". Once you are already "in" an interaction
| session with either of these tools you should be able to simply
| say "no, not that" or "no, <correction>" and the assistant
| should stop talking immediately, instantly, and not continue to
| blather on with the previous wrong interpretation.
|
| No matter how useful these tools are in the hands of a power
| user, Siri and Alexa give the impression of being morons largely
| because of unresponsiveness, not lack of capability.
| [deleted]
| silon42 wrote:
| I would never choose to talk to the machine unless there's no
| alternative...
|
| There's a reason voicemail has largely been replaced by email,
| etc...
|
| Then there's the spying issue.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| They managed to control the tech so tightly that no potential is
| fulfilled and they're boring.
|
| Truly opened to developers they could have been really
| interesting and fun.
|
| This is what happens when big companies develop technologies and
| think they are too valuable to share.
| lixtra wrote:
| This also pissed me off. Why not start the day with a weather
| report, short news and some trivia. When I checked long time
| ago I didn't find any way to integrate stuff like that
| together.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| It's possible to do that with a morning routine in Alexa. I
| know this because it tells me the weather (and other things)
| after I kill my alarm in the morning.
| stirlo wrote:
| If you check again now this is a out of the box feature on
| Google Assistant. You just say "good morning" and it tells
| you the time, weather, news, and more.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| Voice assistants _do_ have a lot of potential due to the
| fantastic ergonomics. "Voice command line" is used as a
| pejorative here but it's true and a _good_ thing. The original
| visionaries were right to pursue this idea.
|
| To me where it's gone wrong is that like many other things the A
| team conceives it but the B team is responsible for its
| development. The A team will ask "what will users want to say to
| it"? But Team B says "well if they say 'blah' how do we _know_
| that they mean 'blah'"? Mediocrity creeps in.
|
| As an example, here is a typical dialog between me and my Alexa.
|
| "Alexa, play Brahms C Minor Piano Quartet."
|
| "Playing: music like Coldplay."
|
| "NO"
|
| [music like Coldplay]
|
| "Alexa NO"
|
| [music like Coldplay]
|
| "STOP"
|
| [music like Coldplay]
|
| "ALEXA STOP STOP"
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| The problem is simply that voice is a 1-D (linear) interface
| whereas computer screen is 2-D.
|
| So when I interact with the screen it can show me all my possible
| choices at the same time at each situation. I click a menu-item
| and a sub-menu pops up.
|
| With a voice-assistant I would have to wait for the assistant to
| list all possible choices but if they are many that takes a long
| time. You can only hear one word at a time. Combine that with
| inaccuracies of voice-recognition and it is clear that a computer
| screen + mouse is a much better interface.
|
| Hey it's the same difference as with Radio vs. TV.
|
| A computer screen-interface might be usefully augmented with
| voice recognition. But working with voice alone is like working
| blind. Gee who could've thought voice is not the killer-tech of
| 3rd millennium.
| butterNaN wrote:
| What are some privacy respecting voice assistants?
| aaron695 wrote:
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| It reminds me of the chatbot fever there was a few years back, it
| seems like every company wanted a chatbot. Even though as a user
| I much prefer a normal menu.
|
| I think voice assistants will continue to have good use cases in
| cars, kitchens etc. where you can't use your hands so the trade-
| off is worthwhile.
| yashg wrote:
| I own a 3rd gen Echo Dot. I am not sure where it is right now. It
| needs to be plugged in, so useless as a portable speaker. I don't
| control anything via voice in my home. The only time I use voice
| commands is while driving to tell my phone to play some specific
| song or call someone. I have a few smart lights in my home and I
| always find it much quicker to change color etc by using the app
| since the phone is always within reach than call out a voice
| command.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| While I get it why Amazon, Microsoft, and Google (?) might want
| to reduce development costs for voice interfaces, it seems like
| Apple is locked in to supporting Siri since one of its products,
| the Apple Watch, really needs Siri to get full value from it. I
| like to go about my day without carrying a phone (if I don't need
| to take pictures) and the Apple Watch is a great compromise that
| allows getting calls and text messages, but at the same time is
| not intrusive as an iPhone. No one sits in a restaurant staring
| lovingly at content on their Apple Watch, ignoring nearby people
| and their environment.
|
| Pardon my getting a bit off topic, but it is interesting to see
| the "belt tightening" by FANGs: it seems like everyone is cutting
| excess staff and looking hard at which products make money and
| which are money losers. This may seem like a good thing except
| for newer product categories like AR/VR that will need a lot of
| experimentation to get right.
| samwillis wrote:
| I think it's fairly clear now that the only time a voice based UI
| is better is when the user is unable to use their hands. Driving
| or in the kitchen when cooking seem the be the most successful.
| The are barely any other strong use cases.
|
| On top of that the general distrust of the privacy of these
| systems has stoped a significant number of people (myself
| included) from wanting to us them at all. I don't have an in home
| device, and have turned off Siri on my Apple devices.
| red_Seashell_32 wrote:
| Or in countries where we get snow during Autumn. Getting
| messages read-out loud, and responding with voice-to-speech is
| great too
| goosedragons wrote:
| I don't think that's true. It's way faster for things like
| smart lights and playing music. The problem is it's still so
| limited for other things. For example I can tell Alexa to play
| The Simpsons on Fire TV, it will do so on Disney+ but always
| the first episode even though the last watched one was in
| Season 15. It also can't seem to find my purchased episodes
| from iTunes (watchable with the Apple TV app on Fire TV).
| Simple searches also have a high chance of being misunderstood
| still with poor results.
|
| I think if the accuracy was better and more content/things were
| available through voice it would be a pretty good input method
| for any scenario where you don't need visual feedback.
| phh wrote:
| This is a real problem, though the problem is not technical,
| it's purely contract/legal: Disney+, AppleTV (all content
| providers actually) refuse to allow third parties to know
| what you've watched, because viewer data is closely protected
|
| That's why an opensource ToS-violating assistant has chances
| to work better than legal ones, they can just scrape all
| those infos off internet. But then, once you go into that
| grey area, you just end up pirating content already.
| samwillis wrote:
| Selecting content via voice only works when you can either
| name exactly the content you want, or you are choosing a
| general category to play.
|
| Browsing content, or looking it up, via voice is slow and
| playful, it always will be. Who what's to be saying "next",
| "scroll down", or have a full on conversation with an AI to
| try and work out what you want to play? Our fingers on our
| hands have evolved to be incredible at interacting with
| things, we are good at using them. Touch screens or physical
| UIs will never be superseded by voice.
|
| So yes, there is a small use case for voice for controlling
| music/tv, or controlling a few things in the home (heating,
| blinds, lights) but thats it, I don't believe there is this
| massive opportunity to expand it into our everyday lives
| where we are constantly interacting with devices via voice.
| goosedragons wrote:
| You don't need to name content exactly. Saying "Alexa, play
| the sandwich song from Frozen" for example will correctly
| play Love is an Open Door. Ideally this kind of thing would
| work for TV and movies too, web searches as well.
|
| Humans evolved language to communicate ideas, wants and
| desires to others for thousands of years. Obviously voice
| UI is not there now but maybe someday the experience won't
| be much different than asking the movie rental store clerk
| for their recommendations for a romantic comedy.
| samwillis wrote:
| > asking the movie rental store clerk for their
| recommendations for a romantic comedy
|
| The only people who ever did that were in a romantic
| comedy.
| simiones wrote:
| That is still an example of knowing the content that you
| want to play exactly, you just don't remember its
| official name - and yes, search engines have gotten
| pretty good at this.
|
| The more relevant use case is "hmm, I'd like to listen to
| some prog rock, let me browse what Spotify has and see
| what takes my fancy". Sure, I could say "VA, play prog
| rock", but I don't want it to choose for me: I want to
| browse the available content to remind myself what are my
| options, and choose one when I see one that looks
| interesting.
| dwighttk wrote:
| >Saying "Alexa, play the sandwich song from Frozen" for
| example will correctly play Love is an Open Door.
|
| I bet ya some engineer at Amazon hooked that up manually
| when they saw a bunch of requests failing, so that's only
| gonna work for popular fuzzy naming conventions. I don't
| want to have to think "is this a way lots of people are
| gonna request this song?" before saying it that way.
| red_Seashell_32 wrote:
| To be fair, that's an issue with siri integration, not siri
| itself. Kinda sad that Apple's own products doesn't implement
| that properly :/
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Driving or in the kitchen when cooking seem the be the most
| successful.
|
| Since the voice assistants are incredibly stupid I find it
| extremely stressful and distracting to ask them for anything
| while driving.
| enobrev wrote:
| Google (android auto) was significantly better at this early
| on than it is now. I used to be able to search random topics
| by voice while driving, and it would read me excerpts and
| results. I used it often. Now it's map-specific, messaging,
| or music-specific and nothing else.
| swores wrote:
| Figuring out what works well or not while driving isn't a
| great idea, but using the ones that work well seems fine for
| most people.
|
| Saying "Hey Siri, text Fred <pause> I'm on my way but stuck
| in traffic, eta 4 o'clock" or something along those lines
| nearly always works fine for me and is no more distracting
| than having a conversation with somebody in the car with me.
| If Siri gets some of the message wrong I'll either send a new
| one using clearer speech or wait until I'm not driving to fix
| it if the mistake isn't important.
|
| Sure, it would be possible to then allow myself to get
| distracted by focussing too much on some weird aspect of it,
| but equally it would be possible to get so emotional in a
| conversation with somebody sat next to you that you stop
| paying attention to the road. And we (most people at least)
| don't say "it's not safe to talk at all while driving", we
| just make sure not to go over that line of getting too
| distracted by the conversation.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > or something along those lines nearly always works fine
| for me and is no more distracting than having a
| conversation with somebody in the car with me.
|
| Until you have several Freds in your contact list. Until
| you have friends with foreign/uncommon names. As long as
| you have near-perfect American pronunciation. As long as...
|
| There are too many variables to consider and think of.
| Sometimes I can't get Siri to reliably understand what
| music I want (and my Engilsh is pretty darn good), much
| less anything more advanced.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > As long as you have near-perfect American
| pronunciation.
|
| There isn't a such thing as an American accent. Ask
| anyone who is not a native speaker and either hasn't been
| to US that long and tries to understand my natural deep
| southern accent. I can adjust my accent if needed and if
| I think about it.
| simiones wrote:
| There is an accent that is typically called "standard
| American" or something along those lines, which is what
| you'll hear on things like national news programs. I'm
| not sure how many Americans actually speak with this
| accent, but it's usually the one that all of these
| devices target initially.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Yeah, I was thinking along the lines of "General
| American"/"California English":
|
| - General American
| https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/united-states-of-
| accents-...
|
| - California English
| https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/the-united-states-of-
| acce...
| JohnFen wrote:
| The "Standard American" accent is the west coast (mostly
| California) accent. It is far from universal.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It is Midwestern and, while not universal, it is the
| majority of speakers on the coasts and people I have met
| from the Midwest.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's essentially how a homogenized middle+ class of
| people born/raised in/around metropolitan areas that
| aren't in the South/Texas speak. (In general,
| stereotypical accents associated with various cities are
| mostly more of a working class thing, e.g. Southie in
| Boston.) The South is the main outlier. Colleagues I work
| with from and living in North Carolina generally have a
| distinct southern accent albeit a mostly slight one. But,
| yeah, historically we'd have called it Midwestern.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think historically we'd probably have said it was
| Midwestern. But, yeah, however the network news anchors
| speak.
| simiones wrote:
| > Hey Siri, text Fred <pause> I'm on my way but stuck in
| traffic, eta 4 o'clock
|
| That only works well if you have an accent it recognizes,
| if you're speech is clear (not slurred, not lisping etc),
| if you don't stammer, if you don't have any verbal tics
| that you don't want to show up in the message, and if
| "Fred" is actually a simple unambigous name.
|
| Otherwise, at best when you want to send a message to
| "Ioana" it may end up sending a message to "Anna" that says
| "I'm, ummm, oh my way! and stalking traffic ate a what was
| it like 4 like maybe 4 and you know what <pause>" (followed
| by the "4 o'clock" that will no longer be included).
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| >Driving
|
| While driving, I wanted to have Siri read a lengthy webpage to
| me. I pulled up the page, got in the car and asked Siri to
| "speak screen." Siri says it can't do that when I am driving!
| What idiot thought that was a necessary safety measure? What if
| I were the passenger?
|
| Overall, I am stunned at how bad Siri is at things that don't
| even require AI. It's almost as if this insanely profitable
| company failed to invest a tiny bit of money into researching
| ways that people would like to use Siri.
| kevsim wrote:
| Totally agree. "Hey Siri, start a timer for X minutes" and "Hey
| Siri, play Y on Spotify" are the entire extent of my voice
| assistant interactions.
| aflag wrote:
| And I'm always annoyed that it doesn't tell me how long I set
| each timer to when I have multiple timers, just the remaining
| time, which makes it hard for me to know which is which.
| cmckn wrote:
| It's not encouraging that even the most common use cases
| for these systems still have rough edges.
|
| The Google ones do support named timers, so you can say
| "start a pasta timer" and later ask "what's left on my
| pasta timer" etc. I thought Siri added this at some point,
| but I wouldn't be surprised if not.
| sbuk wrote:
| It does. "Hey Siri, set a timer for 45 minutes called
| pasta bake", "Hey Siri, how long left on pasta bake?"
| works.
| aflag wrote:
| Actually, it seems that google is now able to cope with
| things a bit better. I've just tried and I can now ask
| for "how long left on my 45-minute timer?" and it does
| finally answer. It actually also shows up in the UI. That
| is sort of recent, though, as I've had that problem
| earlier this year. It seems that siri is now unable to
| set multiple timers, though.
|
| Anyway, it does seem to have improved, but I wonder why
| that stuff wasn't in from day one. It seems pretty
| obvious to me.
| sbuk wrote:
| Nope, Siri can also do multiple timers. It asks for an
| name if an unnamed timer of the same length already
| exists.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Weirdly, the ability to set multiple timers varies by the
| device you are using.
|
| A HomePod can set multiple timers. A Watch, iPhone, or
| iPad can only set one timer. There is no obvious
| technical reason for it. It just seems like only the
| HomePod team thought it was an important feature.
|
| This becomes annoying if you have multiple devices set to
| respond to "hey Siri" and the wrong one picks up the
| request and then refuses to comply.
| s1mon wrote:
| This used to be true, but at least the Apple Watch lets
| me do this all the time. I forget which OS update added
| the capability.
| aflag wrote:
| Oddly enough, in the iPadOS 15.7.1 at least if I say "Hey
| siri, set a timer for 20 minutes" it will say "20
| minutes, starting now". Then if I say "Hey siri, set a
| timer for 5 minutes" it says "there's already a 20 minute
| timer. Replace it?"
|
| If I say "set a timer for 20 minutes called A" it just
| ignores the "called A" part.
| amake wrote:
| I do "Hey Siri set a timer for Foo for 5 minutes" I get a
| timer named Foo, and I can then set concurrent timers
| named Bar, Baz, etc. without replacement.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yep, that seems to work which brings us back to the need
| to memorize fairly precise incantations.
| noelsusman wrote:
| It even plays a little Italian jingle if you start a
| pasta timer.
| nonanonymo wrote:
| I discovered recently that you can set a timer just by saying
| "Hey Siri, four minutes," or however long you want, and she
| will set a timer to that length. Not that I'm doing anything
| with the extra second I've saved myself, but it feels good
| anyway.
| algesten wrote:
| And then it typically interacts and fails without feedback.
| I've tried so many times to tell Siri "Send a message to x that
| I'm 10 mins away", only to realize much later that "message
| delivery failed".
|
| No clear feedback, a weird timing issues where it just stalls
| and show the message it' about to send in case it got it wrong.
|
| It's just a terrible UX all around.
| causi wrote:
| I've had to stop using Google Assistant to send messages. It
| used to ask the user to choose the correct word when it
| misheard something. Now it just makes a wild-ass guess and
| sends it on. It's caused me to send some very odd messages to
| people and/or look like an idiot.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >the only time a voice based UI is better is when the user is
| unable to use their hands. Driving
|
| my observation of people on the road has led me to conclude
| that Driving is an activity where people think they can do
| absolutely anything else while engaged in it.
| bluGill wrote:
| When you put it like that you will get a lot of upvotes.
| However for almost all specifics you will get a ton of
| downvotes when you name them, and probably someone saying no
| that is okay. (these days if you say "you can't drink alcohol
| while driving" you are safe, 30 years ago if there had been
| an internet people would have said you are wrong)
| thiht wrote:
| > Driving
|
| Siri never triggers when I'm driving, it just doesn't hear me.
| I think it's because of the noise of the car or because of my
| music, but it doesn't work. I have to move my face closer to my
| phone so that it can hear me, but that's even more dangerous
| than using the controls.
|
| Same when I'm in the shower and I ask it to change the music,
| it doesn't hear me, I have to shout and get angry every time.
| balfirevic wrote:
| Is your phone mounted close to the air vent? Siri hears me
| perfectly in my car, even when the phone is in my pocket but
| it doesn't hear me at all when I mount the phone on the air
| vent.
| thiht wrote:
| Yes, it is. Maybe it doesn't hear me because of that.
|
| For what it's worth, it doesn't work either when it's my
| pocket. When I come home and ask it to turn the lights on,
| it doesn't answer if it's not in my hand.
| Tagbert wrote:
| You might try blowing the microphone holes with a can of
| air. It may be clogged with pocket lint.
| balfirevic wrote:
| That might be a separate issue - you have to specifically
| enable a setting which will make the phone listen for Hey
| Siri when it's face down (or in the pocket).
|
| See here: https://support.apple.com/en-
| gb/guide/iphone/iphaff1d606/ios...
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| Even while driving, it's useless past basic commands.
|
| My most egregious example of this for me is that there's a
| grocery store near me that the Google assistant is incapable of
| finding because of a few people in my contacts list. Whenever I
| try to ask it for directions to that store, it picks (at pretty
| much random) one of three of my contacts instead. This is
| despite the only common part of said contacts' names and the
| grocery store is that their names all start with the same
| letter.
|
| Basically, imagine asking for directions to Albertsons, and the
| assistant giving you directions to Andrew.
| college_physics wrote:
| > when the user is unable to use their hands
|
| this is still potentially a huge domain. one _could_ imagine a
| benign scenario where voice assistants enhance people 's
| abilities to interact with each other (and digital devices)
| when a more potent UI is not within reach
|
| privacy concerns (->controversial business models) and
| technical ability to deliver a desirable service (that people
| would pay for) might indeed prevent this vision from catching
| on in the short term
|
| another factor that may complicate adoption might be just
| cultural / perceptions. It is a somewhat odd thing to be
| shouting at devices - especially in the presence of other
| people. User interfaces that interfere strongly with
| communication habits and behaviors established over millennia
| (see also wearing VR goggles) might have a harder time seeing
| adoption outside very specific scenarios
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Fully agree on the privacy distrust.
|
| BTW, another use case for speech recognition is when you're
| carrying a baby around.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| I've gotten pretty good at doing chores one handed...
| maweki wrote:
| I'd say my baby preferred me playing around with my phone
| than speaking up. Doubly so when they were carried around
| sleeping.
| kwash wrote:
| I worked in a project where some funny guy was trying to sell
| voice assistant for a company selling LPG for housewives in
| Brazil, and of course nobody ever used this.
| bhouston wrote:
| I love Google Assistant but it doesn't recognize well my wife or
| daughter voices. Thus they find it annoying and do not use it.
|
| I use it primarily to turn on and off the lights (multiple times
| per day), play music, turn off the TV (but not to play things on
| TV, too unreliable) and to raise/lower the temperature on the
| Nest.
|
| We have tried to use the Nest Cams with the Hubs as a baby
| monitor but the cameras feeds freeze and don't tell you so it is
| actually dangerous.
| kwash wrote:
| I worked in a project where some funny guy was trying to sell
| voice assistant for a company selling LPG for housewives in
| Brazil. Nobody ever used this
| Semaphor wrote:
| I think Amazon is one of the worst platforms possible for voice
| shopping. For something that can barely understand what you want,
| you want a small store, that doesn't have multiple products or
| sellers per type. I could imagine using voice ordering at my low-
| carb store, when I ask for "white almond flour", there will be
| exactly one product they can deliver. At Amazon? I might as well
| order from AliExpress, it's a marketplace, you need human-level
| intelligence to order something, not a robot that can't even
| figure out what band to play if there are 2 similar-ish sounding
| ones.
| inferense wrote:
| The reason for voice assistants not taking off is quite simple
| imo. You don't know what it's capabilities are beyond the well
| known use cases ("set up a timer for 15min") but are well aware
| of that it's not going to understand everything. It's limitations
| are obscure and you've been misunderstood in the past, why waste
| more time. Compared to a human who understands everything you
| say, you have the full confidence of using voice.
| iandanforth wrote:
| The only thing missing from the experience is occasionally
| being eaten by a grue.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Not surprising.
|
| What we were promised: a personal well-trained butler.
|
| What we got: a voice input field that you _know_ will be
| incorrectly interpreting your intents far too often.
| psychomugs wrote:
| I've been dabbling with Talon to reduce the burden on my precious
| arm tendons. It's the most useful voice interface I've used due
| to its customizability, but with that great customizability comes
| a great learning curve that it seems only techies would bother
| with.
| billbrown wrote:
| I liked Gary Marcus' post about this -
| https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/how-come-smart-assistants-...
| gw98 wrote:
| It's useful for trivial unambiguous tasks where you have your
| hands full or don't want to touch your device or it's dangerous
| to. That's all I can muster mine for.
|
| "Hey Siri, add more toilet paper to the shopping list" (while
| pooping)
|
| "Hey Siri, shuffle my music" (while driving)
|
| "Hey Siri, countdown 10 minutes" (while shoving a pizza in the
| oven)
|
| Anything else is a shit show. Anything where trust or accuracy is
| involved i.e. mutating data, spending money, absolutely no way
| can I trust it at all and never will.
| Shank wrote:
| > "Hey Siri, add more toilet paper to the shopping list" (while
| pooping)
|
| This is the main reason why I have an Echo in my bathroom! The
| one advantage Alexa has over everything else is that you can
| voice shop -- "alexa buy more toilet paper" solves the problem
| _that much faster_ than a reminder for later.
| gw98 wrote:
| I don't want that to happen because the price variation in
| toilet paper is huge based on deals and offers available, and
| Amazon is rarely the cheapest provider these days, so it's
| actually worth me spending a few minutes on it to save some
| money.
|
| The reason Alexa exists is to sell you Amazon's prices, not
| necessarily a good deal.
| aflag wrote:
| Also, I think I'd rather just add stuff to my shopping list
| so that I can at a later time order everything together,
| rather than have multiple deliveries.
| ghaff wrote:
| The sort of consumables I might order on Amazon on a
| regular basis--like those that the Amazon Dash buttons were
| intended to address--can vary a fair bit in price and
| quantity. I'm not going to have Amazon just ship whatever.
|
| And it's not even a very frequent thing. Mostly, every few
| months, I look through what consumables need replenishing
| and I fill up the car with plus-size packages from Walmart.
| ciaron wrote:
| Agreed, but I find for even these simple tasks it's hit-and-
| miss for accuracy. My Google device will randomly not know what
| a "shopping list" is, or the interactions go something like
| this:
|
| "Hey Google, put dishwasher salt on the shopping list" "OK, I
| added 'put dishwasher salt'" (strangely, this particular bug
| only manifests for dishwasher salt).
|
| Timers are useful, but sometimes they can't be shut off by
| voice command.
| gw98 wrote:
| Yeah it doesn't always work well. I say _" hey siri add green
| milk to the shopping list"_. I want _" green milk"_ added to
| the shopping list which in the UK is semi-skimmed milk. What
| does it do? Adds _" green"_ and _" milk"_ because it thinks
| I'm a weed smoker...
| sambeau wrote:
| Lights on lights off is also useful, especially when in bed or
| carrying a basket-full of washing.
| jayelbe wrote:
| Mmhmm, I never handle my phone while pooping, no siree.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| Trust and accuracy is involved in the first and last of your
| examples - I'd end up having to check that the TP was actually
| added to the list, and that the timer had actually begun and
| was set to 10 mins.
|
| Shuffling music, turning lights on, yes fine - because
| confirmation that the right thing has happened is instant and
| effortless. Anything else, I'll use a button or a screen.
| muspimerol wrote:
| Not really - adding toilet paper to a shopping list is not
| clicking the "buy" button. And if you set up a timer you get
| quick confirmation that it has been set. If the timer is
| accidentally set for 100 mins it's easily corrected.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| I just asked Alexa to set a timer for 2 mins, and you're
| right - she did then ponderously state that a timer for 2
| mins was starting. Then she asked me if I'd like to hear
| tips about using timers? No. Then she told me I had two
| notifications, would I like to hear them? No.
|
| Then I timed myself setting a timer on my phone, which took
| 9 seconds from pocket to running.
|
| Adding to a shopping list isn't clicking the "buy" button,
| no - but if it's not on the list I won't buy it and then I
| will have no toilet paper. I would not need a list if I
| could simply remember everything.
| mikestew wrote:
| _Then she asked me if I 'd like to hear tips about using
| timers? No. Then she told me I had two notifications,
| would I like to hear them? No._
|
| Are you saying this for comedic effect, or does the Alexa
| really do this? (I'd look it up myself, but good luck
| with _that_ query...) To each their own, but I 'd throw
| the device into the street if it pulled a stunt like
| that.
|
| _Then I timed myself setting a timer on my phone, which
| took 9 seconds from pocket to running._
|
| To the Homepod or my Apple Watch: "hey, siri, tea timer
| for three minutes".
|
| "Three minute tea timer, starting now."
|
| I didn't think a product could screw that up. I would
| suppose it's a design decision between "assistant" and
| "servant that carries out my command without backtalk".
| There are times that I wish the Apple product were more
| "assistant" than "servant", but the Alexa product just
| sounds pushy.
| Crosseye_Jack wrote:
| I use Alexa for shopping lists, I get a "toilet paper
| added to your shopping list" confirmation after adding
| items to my list.
|
| It's not perfect though, for example when trying to add
| fruit and fibre cereal it will often add two items,
| "fruit" and "fibre". But its close enough that when I get
| to the store and check the list I know what I intended to
| add to the list.
| ht_th wrote:
| I think the parent meant that you need to check if these
| commands are executed properly, otherwise you get into
| trouble later. For example, if the toilet paper isn't added
| to the shopping list, and you go shopping with this list
| the next day trusting it contains everything you need,
| you're not buying the toilet paper. Similarly, if the timer
| is accidentally set to 100, you only notice it after, say,
| 20 minutes when there's black smoke coming out of the oven.
| [deleted]
| gw98 wrote:
| Definitely agree with this. You get that confirmation with
| siri. I mostly use my watch for it and it will show me what
| it did on the screen without having to touch anything.
|
| Confirmation is required when dealing with humans as well ...
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11fCIGcCa9c (this reminds me
| of Alexa)
| eternityforest wrote:
| Google is pretty good about that. It will say "Ok, your alarm
| is set for 7 hours and 40 minutes from now" and similar.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| It's really shocking how bad all voice assistants are considering
| how amazing LLMs are. There must be major effort underway in all
| companies to upgrade all of them to LLMs in the backend.
|
| OpenAI charges 2 cents per about 750 words (for their best
| model), or roughly 1 cent per minute of talking. Maybe they can
| add LLMs as a premium feature, $3 a month for an actually smart
| home assistant seems like a deal.
| jaysinn_420 wrote:
| i have seen a lot of people with physical challenges and
| disabilities discussing how critical these devices have become.
| they may not solve mainstream problems, but they have contributed
| materially to the quality of life for a marginalized community,
| and i hate the idea that they will disappear because big tech
| hasn't found a way to monetize them. i hope that the remnants of
| these projects can be open-sourced or sold to companies that will
| run with them and build and maintain products to support those
| who may have mobility or physical manipulation challenges, that
| are benefiting from voice control.
| woeirua wrote:
| Can we lump chatbots in with this too? Chatbots have totally
| failed to live up to their hype. It seems like we spent billions
| of dollars chasing chatbots and voice assistants only to realize
| that you need strong AI to have something truly useful.
| exabrial wrote:
| Voice assistants are useless tech that has been shoved down the
| users throat to attempt to gain adoption. Google attempted to
| hold me hostage to this with android auto. Previously: voice
| recognition worked just fine. At some point they decided to
| integrate their stupid voice assistant, which probably was the
| same back end anyway... but now it required all sorts of
| permissions (like web and search history) just to do basic things
| like send a text message.
|
| Lost yet another another use to ios.
| lvl102 wrote:
| I think it has to do with privacy and the limitations on training
| data. Or am I being naive?
| scotty79 wrote:
| No wonder it's not doing great. There's zero progress in this
| sphere. Google Assistant if anything, feels worse today than many
| years ago.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| The technology just isn't there yet. A lot of progress has been
| made, but I still need to repeat myself too often. It's more
| frustrating than using an app. We'll nail it in another 20 years
| though, and the voices will be indistinguishable from human ones.
| DevX101 wrote:
| A lot of the more useful information retrieval tasks involve a
| feedback loop. If I'm shopping for a product, I may enter a
| generic term. Then the system sends me images of products
| matching that term. Then I tell the system which product image is
| closest to what I want. Then the system sends me reviews of that
| product. Then I read the reviews and realize this is not what I
| actually want...repeat until I'm satisfied.
|
| I can't do this loop with modern voice assistants.
|
| A voice assistant with contextual conversation skills, and access
| to an "always on" visual monitor (home projector or AR glasses)
| would definitely increase utility by 10x or more
| CrypticShift wrote:
| Conversational Computing is just not ready. Even a better AI,
| alone, will not solve it 100%.
|
| But because of the 2010s meteoric rise of FAANG (in the public
| imagination and stock market) they think they can quickly push
| into mainstream all these immature paradigms like IVA, AR and now
| VR.
|
| All these technologies exist since decades, but they are not
| ready! billions of dollars of investment and marketing are not
| enough to make them so.
|
| As small a Leap as a tactile portable device took us almost 20
| years to reach a conclusive mainstream form (iPhone)
|
| We need to accept that IVA/AR/VR are exponentially larger leaps
| and should remain side-shows for a very long time to come.
|
| For example, Microsoft is finally acknowledging this, with
| HoloLens being now just "to help you solve real business
| problems".
| anon20221123 wrote:
| Voice assistants are the most useful new UI to me since
| smartphones.
|
| I use them to get travel time estimates, reference facts, music
| and podcasts, rewind / forward / pause / resume / next /
| previous, timers, lights, and occasionally broadcast messages on
| home speaker devices.
|
| I use voice UI while cooking, running, mowing, raking, driving,
| changing diapers, putting on my kids' clothes, and while sitting
| with my wife.
|
| My two young children (5 and almost 2) love voice UI. We ask
| about the animal of the day, what does this animal sound like,
| play that song. My older child is beginning to set timers with
| it. My wife recently said having a nearby voice assistant is
| important in a home configuration discussion.
|
| My family and I sometimes have frustrating experiences with voice
| UI, like failed hotwords, shifting syntax, answering on an
| unexpected device, and slow responses. But we still use it
| frequently, and our overall sentiment with voice UI is positive.
| bambax wrote:
| It's quite funny that none of the things you mention involve
| shopping, or any activity that would bring revenue to the voice
| assistant provider.
| anon20221123 wrote:
| Voice UI could be a decisive feature for profitable
| equipment, or generate advertising revenue.
|
| Because it lacks VUI, my family recently didn't buy a new
| ~$400 product. We bought an older version that was marked-
| down and otherwise inferior, but has built-in voice
| assistant.
| ageitgey wrote:
| They still just don't work very well unless you memorize very
| specific exact commands.
|
| The other day, we had to remember to book a school thing for the
| kid. I said "Hey Google, set a reminder for 9pm to [book the
| thing]".
|
| Google replied "Here are web search results for set a
| reminder...."
|
| When they fail constantly at the most basic tasks, usage is going
| to drop way off.
| hengheng wrote:
| They also refuse to ever show a reference so that you can learn
| what you can say, or teach you any other way. Refusing to show
| and teach your users feels arrogant to me. They had to promise
| that you can "just speak naturally" and now they can't roll it
| back.
|
| Meanwhile my success rate for the way I speak is below 20%.
| willhinsa wrote:
| they do chime in and tell you all sorts of things "by the
| way, i can also play music while you're getting ready for
| bed" while i'm trying to concentrate and live my life lol.
|
| just compile a list of all commands into an email and send
| that to me. i don't actually want to hear you talk, siri
| Shank wrote:
| Voice assistants are basically just mainstream non-visual
| command-lines, and it's unsurprising to me that something that
| relies heavily on memorization and extremely specialized "skills"
| isn't quite taking off in the way it was imagined. A voice system
| that can do literally everything one can do with a keyboard and a
| mouse would be magical, but no system offers that.
|
| Instead, it's a guessing game about syntax and semantics, and
| frequently a source of frustration. There are many failure
| points: it can "hear" you wrong, it can miss the wake word, it
| can hear correctly but interpret wrong, miss context clues, or
| simply be unable to process whatever the request is. In my
| experience, most normal people either relegate voice commands to
| ultra-specific tasks, like timers, weather, and music, and that's
| that. Google and Alexa are relatively good at "trivia" questions,
| but Siri is a complete failure. All systems have edge cases that
| make them brittle.
|
| I think there's potential here. Cortana was the most promising:
| an assistant that's integrated into the OS and can change any
| setting or perform anything on-screen would, again, be really
| awesome. We just don't have that. I think maybe OS-wide + GPT 4
| (or later) might get closer to what we expect, but it's just not
| great right now. I really want to be able to say something as
| unstructured as "hey siri, create alarms every 5 minutes starting
| at 6am tomorrow" or "hey siri, when I get home every day, turn on
| all of the lights, change my focus to personal, and turn on the
| news". There /is/ power to-be-had, but nobody has really tapped
| it.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> A voice system that can do literally everything one can do
| with a keyboard and a mouse would be magical, but no system
| offers that.
|
| And even then, a voice assistant is essentially a user
| interface, not a product or service.
|
| It could be a service if you could reliably say "Alexa, plan my
| trip to customer X the week of the 30th and send me my
| itinerary". But for now they are an alternative to a phone UI.
| ghaff wrote:
| The reality is that even a human personal assistant can
| rapidly devolve to being more of a hindrance than a help if
| they're not very good once you get beyond simple mechanical
| tasks. Even with all the knowledge about the world that most
| adults carry around in their heads. Yes, a poor human
| assistant can fall down in other ways such as forgetting to
| do something--but they have a _lot_ of context.
|
| This seems a really high bar for voice assistants aspiring to
| do much more than set alarms or turn the odd light etc. on or
| off.
| bluGill wrote:
| These days few people have personal secretaries, but back
| when they were common they really were personal - once you
| got a personal secretary she (nearly always she, I feel
| like we should acknowledge sexism even though it is
| irrelevant my point) would follow you (nearly always male),
| as you moved job to job and up the ladder. She went with
| the you because once you spent a few years training her to
| how you worked, a new secretary would greatly limit your
| effectiveness.
|
| These days a large part of what people relied on
| secretaries for a computer can do faster, so only at the
| highest levels do you see them. There are still secretaries
| at the low levels, but not nearly as many, and they are not
| doing the same tasks.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's pretty much it. We call them executive admins
| these days where they exist.
|
| And, yeah, assistants shared with a bunch of other people
| --as with travel agents in general--aren't really all
| that useful. If I'm mostly just giving fairly mechanical
| instructions to execute, it's probably easier for me to
| go online and figure out the options myself.
|
| A secretary made a lot more sense when you dictated memos
| for inter-office mail and retrieving information often
| involved making multiple phone calls.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> This seems a really high bar for voice assistants
| aspiring to do much more than set alarms or turn the odd
| light etc. on or off.
|
| That's kind of my point. A voice assistant is just a fancy
| UI until they reach the level of AGI, and I don't see the
| point in spending billions of dollars on them to be a
| simple UI as Amazon seems to be doing.
| enobrev wrote:
| If that voice assistant were self hosted in the little
| device, I agree. But those simple interfaces are connected
| directly to a significantly larger machine that literally
| knows everything about you and half of everyone you know.
| It's not unheard of to expect it to be more useful than
| setting timers and playing music.
| ghaff wrote:
| They "know" a bunch of discrete facts. They don't know
| that if you book me on a red-eye unnecessarily to save
| $100 I'll be hunting you down. Or any of a zillion other
| flexible preferences--some of which I'm not even very
| consistent about.
| enobrev wrote:
| I don't know about you personally, but google definitely
| knows I've never booked a red-eye and that I haven't
| booked a layover since the early aughts. I'm fairly sure
| Google could easily figure out not only where I'd be
| interested in flying to in the next few months, but when
| and for how long, and at what price points I'd consider
| upgrading my flight.
|
| I know they know this about me not only because of my
| Gmail account but also because I use Google flights to
| find the flights before I book them.
|
| Unfortunately they're not using this data to help me.
| Rather they're using it to target advertising to me. But
| they definitely have the data and the machinery to be
| more useful to me with more than just a few facts
| ghaff wrote:
| Maybe my travel is more complicated but I even not
| infrequently get annoyed with "past me" for various
| travel-related decisions. I avoid red-eyes but at some
| price point I won't--or maybe only if it's someone else's
| money. And maybe I don't have a choice based on my
| schedule or just what flights are available. Normally I
| won't do an unnecessary layover but maybe I will to fly
| my preferred airline.
|
| It gets complicated in a hurry and for the cases where it
| is relatively simple (and when it gets into very complex
| international travel a voice interface is going to be
| completely useless), I can look up my options pretty
| quickly on a computer.
| 7952 wrote:
| I think the biggest potential is with Microsoft Teams in
| business. It is ubiquitousness in people's work life, has
| access to data and has integrated with everything. And adding
| cortana to calls would be an easy step for people to understand
| and learn. People would say "cortana share my screen". People
| would learn phrases from each other.
| happymellon wrote:
| But teams hasn't figured out how to send text in a coherent
| way.
|
| It's used because companies can cheap out on buying a license
| for other communication applications, it is fundamentally
| worse than anything else in any other metric. If voice lets
| me respond to a message without hunting for the hidden reply
| because Teams shoves it below the bottom of the screen then
| it could be a win. Considering UX is so low for Teams I doubt
| it will.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| The potential would be there, if they would focus on the
| assistant-part, and take the voice just as a mean to interact
| with the assistant, besides other means like clicking, typing,
| showing complex information on a screen, etc.
|
| Voice alone sucks, it's just too limited to be useful on a
| grand scale. Similarly, command lines suck too. The shell in
| general has the same problems that Voice assistants have, just
| that they have more value and had decades to mature into
| something actually useful. And toady we have unix-shells which
| reduce the problematic parts by many levels, and still receive
| constant improvements. This is missing for voice assistants,
| because unix-shells are growing and improving in an open space,
| where everyone can add their own things. This is not happening
| in big tech.
| bogdanstanciu wrote:
| I think these assistants just need to give the user a way to
| edit interpretations.
|
| A 'debug' area that lets you ask a command, see what was
| interpreted - and immediately edit or click "that's not what I
| wanted". But not an afterthought and not a cumbersome process
| like setting up an automation that is triggered by specific
| commands.
|
| Imagine telling your voice assistant "You're wrong, as usual"
| and instead of it giving you the boiler plate "I'm sorry ", it
| actually offered a way to improve itself.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| To me the hardest problem is simply remembering what every
| light on my network is named. Did I call the light next to my
| desk "desk light" or did I call it "office light"? If I don't
| get the name exactly right, I cannot control the light.
| Multiply that by every other light in the house and it becomes
| a lot to remember. I have probably 15 lights controlled by
| Alexa and I can only remember the name of like three of them.
| Thus most of the time it is just "Alexa turn on the lights" so
| it can turn everything on in a room.
|
| If these voice assistants were smarter about "alternative"
| names for every device it might be easier to use. But as it
| stands, it's kind of a pain because the way you phrase each
| request is so unforgiving...
|
| Oh yeah, and god help you if your device name is similar to
| your room name. If your room is "office" (or did I name it "the
| office"?) and your light is "office light" Alexa is gonna have
| a bad time figuring the two apart.
|
| I have no clue how to fix this...
|
| PS: this is why I question steering wheel free self driving
| cars. How will we tell these things exactly where to go when we
| cannot even reliably tell our voice assistants exactly what
| light to turn on?
| bambax wrote:
| > _I think there 's potential here._
|
| But how? Even if those interfaces were actually working, it's
| still extremely inconvenient to talk when you can click. You
| have to be somewhere where talking out loud doesn't disturb the
| people around you. That excludes most situations: open space
| offices, restaurants, coffee shops, public transport, cars with
| passengers, and most places in the home except maybe the
| bathroom.
|
| And even if you're all alone in a silent place, giving
| instructions out loud takes more time than configuring a
| screen, and will always be error prone, because the feedback
| will always be ambiguous and imprecise.
|
| Except maybe if the feedback is on a screen, but then if
| there's already a screen, why not use it.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| If the assistant AI was advanced enough for pleasant
| conversations to occur, it would be useful.
|
| The would be trivial to use the interface on screen when
| appropriate, and a truly smart assistant should be able to
| follow the context and be aware of your preferences and mood.
|
| This is not fundamentally impossible, we're simply not there
| yet.
| pmontra wrote:
| > But how? Even if those interfaces were actually working,
| it's still extremely inconvenient to talk when you can click
|
| Working from home changes that. I can see many more
| opportunities for a multimodal input interface. Examples:
|
| 1. My fingertips now are closer to the "reply" button below
| this text area than they are even to the touchpad. Touching
| "reply" is half a second, moving one hand to the touchpad,
| aiming the pointer at the button and clicking takes longer.
| With a mouse: much longer. Anyway, my screen is not a
| touchscreen. I'll click.
|
| 2. Or, with an assistant, I could have said "Click reply",
| provided that the assistant knows where the focus is and that
| it can read the form I'm typing in.
| jorams wrote:
| Your fingertips while typing are even closer to the Tab and
| Enter keys on your keyboard, which, if pressed in sequence,
| have the exact same effect. Much simpler and much faster
| than either of your options.
| pmontra wrote:
| Faster, don't know. Simpler, I didn't even think about
| it. However I'm doing it now. Thanks.
| papito wrote:
| Well, you are not trying to operate heavy machinery with
| Amazon Echo - hopefully. Voice as a common interface - I
| agree with all of that, but to me the everyday utility of
| being able to add something to my shopping list or my TODO
| list without having to fire up an APP greatly increases my
| quality of life. That part is magical, but I don't expect a
| lot more from it.
| ghaff wrote:
| I used to use Alexa for my shopping list. I guess over time
| I came to the conclusion that adding something to a steno
| pad or my whiteboard was even easier.
| t-sauer wrote:
| I think the best use cases for voice assistants are when you
| don't have free hands. I have two scenarios where I use voice
| assistants: setting a timer while cooking and changing the
| music while showering. Both could be done by other means as
| well but they wouldn't be more convenient.
| jfoster wrote:
| Asking the time whilst getting ready.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Seems like a perfect fit for a clock?
| [deleted]
| bambax wrote:
| Or a watch?
| HPsquared wrote:
| Apple watch does have Siri, I suppose. They could be
| really bold and remove the screen.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Both or either would suffice.
| teambob wrote:
| Also when driving but Siri / Google assistant are more
| applicable for that use case
| palebluedot wrote:
| Exactly. For instance, in the mornings Google Assistant has
| been really useful for when I say "OK Google, Good
| Morning". It then runs through and tells me:
|
| * Current time, and weather forecast for the day
|
| * Upcoming meetings today
|
| * My current commute time to work, including traffic
|
| * NPR news podcast
|
| So during my routine of letting the dogs out, starting the
| coffee, etc. in the morning, I get the daily "essential"
| info.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > But how? Even if those interfaces were actually working,
| it's still extremely inconvenient to talk when you can click.
|
| Smart home light/etc while hands are occupied like with a
| baby. But usecases are quite limited
| Shank wrote:
| > But how? Even if those interfaces were actually working,
| it's still extremely inconvenient to talk when you can click.
| You have to be somewhere where talking out loud doesn't
| disturb the people around you. That excludes most situations:
| open space offices, restaurants, coffee shops, public
| transport, cars with passengers, and most places in the home
| except maybe the bathroom.
|
| I would separate out the two, actually. There's a "natural
| language control system for the entire OS" and then there's
| the actual voice part. Voice is often mostly useful for
| accessibility purposes -- hands full, running, driving, etc.
| However, the other side is that a text-based NL assistant
| would also be profoundly useful. On iOS, you can enable
| "Type-to-siri" and you can just type sentences and Siri will
| respond back in text.
|
| If we make progress on NL-driven command-lines, we can
| actually make progress on voice-assistants, and vice versa.
| The catch is that the voice side still needs recognition
| work.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| _" hey siri, when I get home every day, turn on all of the
| lights, change my focus to personal, and turn on the news"_
|
| I think the problem with that is that even I, as a human,
| struggle to know for sure what you want.
|
| You want to turn all the lights on in the house? Does that
| include the lamps in the bedroom? How about new lights that you
| add later? Or the ones in the garden? It's full of ambiguity.
| What device do you want to watch the news on? Or did you mean
| the radio? Do you want this to apply when you get back at 2am
| one night, meaning your family gets woken up when you turn on
| all the lights and start playing the news in their bedrooms?
|
| I think that's probably why voice interfaces aren't likely to
| work well for anything beyond direct, specific, well-scoped
| requests: turn on the lights in the bedroom; turn off the
| heating at home; roll up the blinds; what's the weather like
| today; what's the remaining range on my car. They really
| struggle to deal with anything more complex - not so bad in
| theory, but really incredibly irritating when they make the
| wrong decision.
|
| If you had some kind of 24-hour live-in assistant (a butler,
| maybe?), then they probably have the knowledge and intuition to
| make sensible decisions in response to fairly unstructured
| requests. But I think we're miles off getting a voice assistant
| to do it - not because they can't, necessarily, but because if
| they mess it up at all it's infuriating.
| bombcar wrote:
| You can do _some_ of this with shortcuts, and then use Siri
| to trigger the shortcut. But that involves thinking; the
| magic of Jeeves is that he knows what you want even before
| _you_ do.
| bluGill wrote:
| The problem is there are more different combinations I
| might want as a shortcut then I have time to
| program/remember. I can remember something like a dozen
| commonly used shortcuts. However when 5 years from now I
| arrive home at 2am (for the first time in several decades,
| but it will probably happen at some point again in my life)
| will I remember the correct shortcut - and assuming I do,
| is it up to date with whatever changes have been made to my
| house?
|
| What about the shortcut for when I need to leave at 3am for
| some reason. then a different shortcut for when it isn't
| just me, but my whole family leaving at 3am. An still
| another for my son having to leave that early.
|
| Jeeves can figure it out when I arrive at 2am so I don't
| need to program it.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| You've reminded me of some aspects of these platforms
| that I like in a more general sense - like for example
| the way the Apple Watch will automatically ring the alarm
| on my phone if I forget to put my watch on, or if I get
| up before my alarm goes off the watch will notice and ask
| if I want to skip the alarm for the day. This stuff
| genuinely feels almost like magic sometimes - the risk is
| that when anything like this goes wrong it's awful.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah these are graceful - and the watch will start out
| very light buzzing and then get louder.
| antupis wrote:
| If I would be in this space I would just build voice assistant
| to very specific situations where you cannot type like driving,
| cooking, doing some sport etc. There is lots of potential but
| big players are kinda trying build generic tool for every
| situation which is super hard problem.
| dmitriid wrote:
| You want utility. The big players want a product that can be
| monetized and milked for revenue.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| My Alexa asked me today if I wanted an Avatar theme. No I
| really do not, Alexa. I was reminded of the article a few
| days ago how they can't monetize this well and are somehow
| losing $10 billion. :)
| amelius wrote:
| > There /is/ power to-be-had
|
| This is not power. This is just first-world problems.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Timers and reminders alone are enough to make them a pretty
| nice thing to have though.
|
| I don't really want them to be all that much more powerful,
| because natural language can be imprecise, and... there's just
| not much I that I want to automate in a home setting beyond
| some real simple timers for lights and stuff.
|
| What if I had a bad day and didn't want to see depressing news?
| Or what if I came home and was talking on the phone when it
| turned the news on?
|
| True automation as opposed to just telemetry and remote control
| can easily be annoying more than helpful.
|
| I like the idea of automation... but I don't actually...
| automate anything aside from timers and reminders.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think that's generally true though playing music is a
| little more freeform. (And, guess what? Voice assistants tend
| to be worse at that.)
|
| The problem is that you have many many billions of dollars
| have been sunk into making these devices about more than
| setting alarms and timers. There's actually been a lot of
| pretty amazing progress. But it's yet another one of those
| things that getting to 90% to anyone but techies who want to
| fiddle with their smarthome stuff or otherwise play with the
| technology.
| eternityforest wrote:
| They might have a sudden increase in usefulness when
| smarthome stuff is more common, although smart bulbs are a
| bit of a hassle in most switched outlets, because the
| switch is usually more convenient.
|
| Maybe they'll add an app that lets you browse possible
| commands so it's more discoverable.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's probably true that a well-integrated smarthome would
| benefit from voice control.
|
| But I'd observe that I'm going up to my brother's
| tomorrow and he has all manner of timers and other WiFi-
| connected stuff and none of it has any sort of
| centralized control and that's pretty normal even for
| people who have a lot of that sort of thing.
|
| And, yeah, the only smart light thing I have at home is
| one thing that doesn't have a controlling light switch
| and I used X10 for it for years before I got an Alexa.
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| Talon voice can do everything a keyboard and mouse offers, plus
| more (contextual awareness, higher level abstraction). Very
| powerful in combination with modal editing. I'm not affiliated,
| just a user.
|
| Granted, this is for a specific user base and yes, not in
| coffee shops.
| Sakos wrote:
| The big issue is that there's no clearly defined interface for
| users. What commands are possible? Nobody knows. So people
| default to the most obvious things like setting a timer. Is it
| possible to setup your own commands and build your own work
| flows? AFAIK, no. So the tech is essentially dead in the water
| until companies fundamentally rethink what they're trying to do
| with voice assistants.
| jasmer wrote:
| Yup. At the risk of being glib I would say this is 90% of the
| issue. Or more like 'the big blocking issue' at the moment.
|
| Voice can do way more than we know, but we have no idea what
| it does or how to use it.
|
| Standardizing the interface and providing tutorials would
| possibly change things dramatically.
|
| And this goes for the back-end protocols as well.
|
| The tech is way, way ahead of the UI and integration.
|
| Imagine getting the power of 'git' with no tutorial and not
| really an understanding of what it does? Good luck with that.
|
| 90% of us would be using it in the car to do a lot of things
| if we really knew how to do it:
|
| You: "Siri: Command. Open. Mail. Prompt. Recipients starting
| with S"
|
| Siri: "Sarah, Sue, Sundar"
|
| You: "Stop. Command. Message. To: Sunar. Thanks for the note.
| Stop. Send without Review"
|
| Some of this already exists, but it's product specific etc.
| there needs to be some kind of natural universal interface -
| or we have to wait until the AI is really, really that good.
| sliken wrote:
| I tried Amazon's Alexa, the top end model with a display. Often
| it would taunt you about new/interesting things on the screen,
| but I could never get them to work. I'd had to memorize things
| to get even the basics working. Ended up unplugging it.
|
| However Google's Assistant in comparison worked great, no
| memorization, and very useful. Sure time, weather, set timers,
| and alarms worked great with a very flexible set of natural
| language queries. Even more complex things like what will be
| the temperature tomorrow at 10pm, simple calculations and unit
| conversions. But also things like IMDB like queries about
| directors, actors, which movies someone was in, etc generally
| worked well. It seemed to really understand things, not just "A
| web search returned ...". Even more complex things like the
| wheelbase of a 2004 WRX would return an answer, not a search
| result.
|
| With all that said I'm looking for a non-cloud/on site
| solution, even if it requires more work, most recently noticed
| https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy
| iquerno wrote:
| I would think that a good command-line is one that responds to
| me within milliseconds on a crapbox i386 machine, and I can
| COMMAND it what to do. A good command-line is not a binary blob
| that cannot parse simple instructions correctly.
|
| At the same time, siri seems to be getting slower and fatter
| every iteration so perhaps it is becoming more human ;)
| sokoloff wrote:
| > "hey siri, create alarms every 5 minutes starting at 6am
| tomorrow"
|
| "OK, I've created an infinite number of alarms, every five
| minutes, starting at 6 AM tomorrow!"
|
| (As a native English speaker, I'm not sure what specific
| outcome you _want to happen_ from that request. That 's the one
| that makes the most sense.)
| ghaff wrote:
| As a native English speaker, that seems a profoundly odd
| request but that is what you asked for.
|
| And you now have me wondering how open-ended calendar
| requests are actually implemented given that they can't
| literally have entries out to infinity. (I assume they go out
| some finite period and some background process periodically
| re-populates future entries.)
| mercutio2 wrote:
| A recurrence rule is added to a start event, then an
| occurrence cache is either generated on the fly for periods
| of interest, or, yes, a rolling cache a year or two in the
| future is maintained and updated daily.
| ghaff wrote:
| Perhaps trivial, but actually seems like an interesting
| question given you have to potentially tradeoff RPCs for
| routine queries (and the number of database records) vs.
| being wrong for the random "Am I free on this day three
| years from now?" query. Of course, the answer may be
| that, in general, the differences don't really matter.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| > There /is/ power to-be-had, but nobody has really tapped it.
|
| This kind of thing can't be built for modern mainstream
| operating systems because they generally prevent subjugation of
| the OS components and other programs, even if the user wants
| that, ostensibly for security reasons.
|
| Unlike a human operator, an assistant "app" can only operate
| within the bounds of APIs defined by the OS vendors and third-
| party developers. Gone are the days of third-party software
| that extends the operating system in ways that the overlords
| couldn't (or wouldn't) dream of.
| sdf4j wrote:
| That's not entirely true. Accessibility APIs on macOS, for
| example, would let you control so many aspects of the OS from
| user land apps given that permissions are granted. But voice
| assistants are not up to the task.
| Eleison23 wrote:
| Me and voice assistants are like me on the ballroom dance
| floor. I loved to take the lessons and learn all sorts of moves
| and chain them all together and look impressive, but when I got
| onto the floor with a partner, I just wouldn't know what to do
| or where to start. I kept to the "basic" steps and maybe a
| timid little turn once in a while.
|
| Maybe it's possible to learn a working vocabulary and know how
| to command a voice assistant. I know my way around several
| command lines, but I have no idea what to say to Hey Google.
| Avicebron wrote:
| it almost sounds like you are describing how it feels to
| learn a new language. And if that's the case and people need
| to learn "voice assistant" to communicate with their device
| effectively, hasn't it utterly failed as a natural language
| processor?
|
| Also I know this is true in other domains as well, obviously
| there is a common "google-ese" that people learn to narrow
| down their searches.
| brycehalley wrote:
| Voice assistants have reached the Unhelpful Valley stage.
|
| When they were a novelty I recall the excitement of trying new
| commands and layering in context, after many failures I've been
| conditioned to now only attempt and expect success with generic
| queries.
| sublinear wrote:
| I don't think this is actually reliably possible due to the
| fact that while grammar does tend to follow patterns sometimes,
| we're fundamentally dealing with an exponential amount of ways
| to say things to a voice assistant.
|
| In the spirit of the title of this post, someone else also has
| to say something.
|
| If your argument is that this is a "non-visual command line"
| there's slim hope of the layperson learning a whole secret
| grammar without even a goddamn man page just to do their menial
| tasks.
| ianai wrote:
| I really doubt *nix would have made it so far if the cli were
| audio based, too. It's a fundamentally slower and lower
| bandwidth communication channel.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| *nix was optimized for low-bandwith channels. That's why
| the command names and options are extremely terse and
| typically return trivial output on success. OTOH it was
| assumed that input would be reliable, so there's no
| confirmation required for potentially dangerous commands. A
| "*nix for voice" would need to address that, at the very
| least.
| ianai wrote:
| I'd sure be lost if I had to listen to the entirety of a
| manpage or dmesg output or /var/log/messages read out by
| voice. Some of those could take hours to read out.
| Nothing actually trivial about *nix command output. Just
| sometimes terse.
| gspencley wrote:
| I might be in the minority, but I also don't want to add things
| to my life that make my environment noisier or that require me
| or others living with me to speak more. As much of a Star Trek
| fan as I am, I never found "The Computer" to be appealing, and
| always thought of it more as an artistic device. It's a lot
| easier to communicate a character's intent / action if they are
| vocalizing it for performance. Even in scenes where they are
| "typing" something into the computer, they will inevitably be
| communicating to the captain or another character what they are
| doing.
|
| In practical reality these interfaces feel, to me, as extremely
| inefficient. As someone who doesn't particularly like to speak,
| and prefers silent environments, these interfaces require more
| energy from me to use. Unless they are serving someone who has
| a physical impairment then I don't see what problems exist that
| these solve, but I can identify lots of problems that they
| introduce (not only noise but privacy / security
| vulnerabilities etc.)
|
| Personal preference.
| bistable wrote:
| I think you're identifying some of the right problems here. All
| voice assistants are based on turn-taking, and when the VoiceAI
| hits one of those failure points and just comes back with "I
| didn't get that" it leaves the user in a frustrating state
| trying to debug what's wrong.
|
| I work at SoundHound where we've been worried about these
| issues. (I'm going to plug our recent work...) Our new approach
| is to do natural language understanding in real-time instead of
| at the utterance (turn) taking level. That way we can give the
| user constant feedback in real-time. In the case of a screen
| that means the user sees right away that they are understood,
| and if not, a better hint of what went wrong. For example a
| likely mistake is an ASR mistranscription for a word or two.
|
| We still need to prove this is a better paradigm for VoiceAI in
| products that people can try for themselves, and are working
| towards that goal. I hope that voice interfaces that were
| clunky with turn-taking will finally be more naturally usable
| with real-time NLU.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WLYH1qHfq8
| serial_dev wrote:
| > Instead, it's a guessing game about syntax and semantics, and
| frequently a source of frustration
|
| My biggest frustration with Alexa is getting it play the
| podcasts I want to listen to. Even popular podcasts with
| English names are hard to get just right for Alexa. The same
| goes for song titles and bands that are not popular, or they
| are in other languages.
|
| Usually when I want to take a shower, I try to get the
| podcasts/music to play for 2 minutes, then sigh, give up and
| just say "Alexa play Britney Spears".
| ghaff wrote:
| And discoverability. For a long drive I probably want to pick
| out some specific podcast episodes rather than play whatever.
| I'm just not a whatever background sound sort of person. The
| interfaces aren't really good enough to present me with some
| options with voice control only. So I end up mostly pre-
| populating a "Car" playlist.
| _dain_ wrote:
| >Voice assistants are basically just mainstream non-visual
| command-lines, and it's unsurprising to me that something that
| relies heavily on memorization and extremely specialized
| "skills" isn't quite taking off in the way it was imagined.
|
| This got me thinking. Voice recognition is basically a
| commodity now .. there are open source AI engines that can do
| it offline really well. So the recognition part is solved, you
| can just grab it from your distro's package manager. Now
| there's just the language part.
|
| Thing is, I _don 't_ want to speak to my computer using
| English. Aside from the enormous practical problems in natural
| language processing you've outlined, I just find the idea
| creepy[1].
|
| What I want is to unambiguously tell it to do arbitrary things.
| I.e. use it as an actual computer, not a toy that can do a few
| tricks. I.e. actually program it. In some kind of Turing
| complete shell language that is optimized for being spoken
| aloud. You would speak words into the open source voice
| recognizer, it writes those to stdout, then an interpreter
| reads from stdin and executes the instructions.
|
| Is there any language like this? What should it look like?
|
| And yeah that would take effort to learn to use it right, just
| like any other programming language; so be it. This would be a
| hobbyist thing.
|
| [1] https://i.kym-
| cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/054/961/748...
| Shank wrote:
| > Voice recognition is basically a commodity now .. there are
| open source AI engines that can do it offline really well. So
| the recognition part is solved, you can just grab it from
| your distro's package manager.
|
| I personally don't consider this a fully-solved problem. The
| best transcription system I've used is OpenAI Whisper, and it
| doesn't work in realtime. Maybe it's fine on small amounts
| but it's still not perfect. You really need error to be
| driven down dramatically. Zoom auto-captions are a joke in
| terms of how badly they work for me, and Live Text (beta) on
| macOS is equally dreadful. YouTube auto-captions suck. All of
| these use industry-leading APIs. If I'm speaking a voice
| command and one single word is wrong, usually the whole thing
| fails.
|
| There's an entirely separate issue about things that are
| Proper Nouns that don't exist. For example, "Todoist" is
| often misunderstood by Siri. Thus, people started saying "Two
| doist (where doist rhymes with joist)" to fool it into
| understanding "Todoist". Media like anime with strange titles
| from other languages often flat out trolls these
| transcription systems. ("Hey Siri, remind me to watch Kimetsu
| no Yaiba tomorrow".)
| Aramgutang wrote:
| That reminds me of the handwriting recognition approach [1]
| used in old Palm Pilot devices. Even though the shapes it
| expected you to draw resembled the corresponding letters, you
| would never draw them like that if you were writing on paper.
|
| You knew that you were drawing something designed for a
| computer to recognise as unambiguously as possible, while
| being efficient to draw quickly and easy to learn for you. I
| feel like that's the kind of notion that voice interfaces
| should somehow expand upon.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)
| simiones wrote:
| > Voice recognition is basically a commodity now .. there are
| open source AI engines that can do it offline really well. So
| the recognition part is solved, you can just grab it from
| your distro's package manager.
|
| This is potentially far from true, depending on how exactly
| you draw the line between "voice recognition" and "language".
| I've looked at quite a few transcription services, and they
| fail a lot of the time for most people - those who either
| have a non-native accent (even if very slight!) or those who
| do any amount of stammering or other vocal tics.
| ghaff wrote:
| I find the ML transcription services, given 2 people
| speaking English with high quality sound and without heavy
| accents/a lot of jargon, to be adequate for having a
| skimmable record--such as for extracting quotations (and
| just go back to the recording to confirm the exact words if
| it's not obvious). But if I'm publishing a transcript I get
| a human transcription. Cleaning up the ML stuff takes way
| too much time and I wouldn't publish a transcript without
| cleaning it up.
| simiones wrote:
| I was in fact looking at some transcriptions of my recent
| meetings, and found one that captures how even small
| mistakes can make for completely not-understandable
| transcripts, unless they are manually cleaned up.
|
| Manual transcription:
|
| > So no: long story short, Slum is basically the way we
| can have an individual [, uhhh,] instance that carries
| all the licenses.
|
| (Slum is a project name in this case)
|
| Computer transcription (MS Teams):
|
| > So no.
|
| > A long story shorts. Love is basically the way we can
| have an individual.
|
| > OHS instance that carries all the license.
| viraptor wrote:
| > So the recognition part is solved
|
| If you're using an averaged American voice - maybe. But it's
| really not solved for everyone. Google assistant can't set
| the right timer for me 1/10 times. And that's before we get
| to heavy accent Scots and others.
| bambax wrote:
| Obligatory reference:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8
| arethuza wrote:
| Even my "affected Edinburgh accent", as someone once
| described it, causes no end of trouble with voice
| recognition.
| draugadrotten wrote:
| > And yeah that would take effort to learn to use it right,
| just like any other programming language; so be it. This
| would be a hobbyist thing.
|
| There are quite a few hobbyists working on local on-prem
| privacy focused voice assistans with conversation support.
|
| https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/#voice
| https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/conversation/
|
| Have fun. It is a rabbit hole.
| mc32 wrote:
| To me what's interesting is that MS smelled that it was a
| problem a while ago and pulled the plug before it ate a hole in
| their wallet but Amazon and Google keep plugging along
| ploughing money into a bottomless pit. Apple has a different
| play and looks like they are controlling their losses there
| quite well and may act as a slight loss leader for other
| products.
| foobarian wrote:
| I can't fathom how they managed to spend so much on it,
| though. The product has been around for quite a while, as
| well, so it's not some initial ramp-up cost. $3B/quarter
| $10B/year? Wow.
|
| Edit: Maybe things like this happen because there are various
| nerds who lead these products and are good at talking the
| businesspeople into funding it. Maybe this was only possible
| at the big tech growth stage while business wasn't that good
| at telling the value proposition. So end result, lots more
| engineers get paid which is great in my book :-)
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Your queries continue to be money-sinks -- even in your _ideal_
| case, you aren 't buying anything! This query costs them money
| but earns them nothing. This is useless.
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| Another pitfall of most voice assistants is that they are
| really designed first with the corporation in mind rather than
| the user. Most are proxies for surveillance, advertising, or
| are just steering consumers back to a preferred set of walled-
| garden services.
| gernb wrote:
| > an assistant that's integrated into the OS and can change any
| setting
|
| That sounds like a security nightmare. Someone walks by and
| starts changing your system settings? No thank you
| qsort wrote:
| The problem isn't voice, it's natural language.
|
| Natural language is a fundamentally wrong vehicle to convey
| information to a computer. It can be useful for some specific
| tasks, automated Q/A, simple interfaces to databases, stuff
| where I can't be properly f_ed to remember the syntax or the
| shortcut like IDE commands.
|
| But the idea it can replace formal language is fundamentally
| and dangerously incorrect. I agree with Dijkstra's quip, we
| shouldn't regard formal language as a burden, but rather as a
| privilege.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I'm just waiting for someone to finally release a voice
| assistant built around an actual language model, like GPT-3
| or LaMDA.
|
| It would be more error prone in a lot of ways, which is
| probably why nobody's done it yet, but it would also be a
| _lot_ more powerful, and fulfill the vision of conversational
| AI in a way the current rules-based assistants do not.
|
| I think if powerful language models were easily accessible to
| normal people (in an inexpensive and completely unrestricted
| fashion, like with Stable Diffusion) we'd already see this
| happening in the open source world. Companies are going to be
| a lot more hesitant to try it though until they have a way to
| 100% prevent the models from making mistakes that could
| reflect poorly on the company, which is going to take _way_
| longer to achieve.
| darkerside wrote:
| The problem is both
| version_five wrote:
| Right - natural language works for people because we have
| minds that are communicating. A virtual assistant has a list
| of things it can do, and uses language as an interface to
| them. So the language just becomes obfuscation instead of
| allowing clarification.
|
| I've said before, I would prefer a voice assistant that
| optimized for traversing its menu system, in response to
| unambiguous noises (could be high and low pitch hums or
| whatever) that lets me bypass the guessing game and use the
| menu it's hiding
| klibertp wrote:
| Like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI ?
| Here you traverse the AST, but the idea is similar, I
| think.
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| An example backing this is voice assistants that DO work,
| e.g. Talon voice. But these require defining a language, and
| then they are very accurate and powerful.
|
| I don't see why a voice assistant for the masses couldn't
| "train it's own users", for example suggesting the language
| it does expect. But even then, most times people are talking
| in noisy environments or talk to fast or don't have an
| understand of how the machine might work. Regardless, who
| cares. They ruin the audio environment of a home. They're
| good for setting timers while you're cooking, that's about
| it.
| Thlom wrote:
| Only thing I use Siri for as well.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| They're also fantastic at playing soothing music while your
| hands are busy holding a crying baby.
| tsss wrote:
| Car voice assistants do this, but they're still clunky and
| it takes them forever to list their options. Voice
| interfaces just like CLI suffer from extremely bad
| discoverability and presentation compared to GUIs and thus
| will always be limited to specialty applications. CLIs at
| least have a league of try-hards and hobby linux users to
| keep them alive.
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| Are you trying to say, Alexa should be funding the synthetic
| language nerds over at Lojban[0] or the Universal Networking
| Language[1]???
|
| That would be a fun universe.
|
| [0] https://mw.lojban.org/index.php?title=Lojban&setlang=en-
| US
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Networking_Language
| foobarian wrote:
| The problem is that it doesn't make money.
|
| Otherwise, it works great :-) We love the hands-off usage
| mode because we cook a lot, so adding things to shopping
| lists or looking stuff up doesn't require cleaning hands in
| the middle of prep. Also the speakers are pretty darn good
| for the size and work well for music.
|
| Doing complicated things is right out though. But the simple
| stuff works fine.
| albertzeyer wrote:
| On the other side, humans have been fine using natural
| language to delegate commands to each other.
|
| So maybe it's just that the subfield of natural language
| understanding is still too early to be really useful. Speech
| recognition itself has gotten really good but then
| understanding the context, the intent, etc, all that is
| natural language understanding, and that is often the
| problem.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > have been fine
|
| Citation needed, there's a lot of disagreements and
| misunderstandings (some have cost lives) that could've been
| avoided if we didn't have 10 different ways to say the same
| vague thing that can be interpreted in 20 ways. You think
| the military uses a phonetic alphabet and specifically
| structured communications for fun? Or the way planes talk
| to ATC for example. Where precision and unambiguity is
| crucial, natural language always gets ditched for something
| more formal.
| groestl wrote:
| Thanks for that. A lot of energy is currently sunk
| because of natural language, and I'd argue gains from
| employing software (instead of human processes) for
| various tasks is in part due to scaling up the results of
| many confusing discussions in natural language about what
| a specific process actually comprises.
| numpad0 wrote:
| There is a widely accepted and straightforward thinking
| that humans has ideas, which are expressed in languages,
| and that languages being ambiguous is problematic: this
| I'm starting to have doubts on.
|
| Maybe we don't have clear intentions in the first place,
| maybe languages are not just ambiguous, but only meant to
| narrow realms of valid interpretations down to a desired
| precision, rather than intended to form a logically fully
| constrained statements. Maybe this is why intelligent
| entities are needed to "correctly" interpret natural
| language statements, because an act of interpretation
| itself is a decision making and an action.
|
| Just my thoughts but I do think there are more to be said
| than "natural languages are ambiguous".
| bbarnett wrote:
| This is part of the reason Google search sucks more and
| more.
|
| Around when Android appeared, and the first voice
| searches began, Google suddenly started to alias
| everything.
|
| Search for 'Andy', 'Andrew' appears. Search for 'there',
| and 'they're' appears.
|
| This has been taken further, now silly aliases such as
| debian .. ubuntu exist, and as google happily drops words
| in your search, to find a match, this makes precision
| impossible.
|
| But, that's the only way to make voice search remotely
| work, so...
| jefftk wrote:
| I don't think this is to support voice search: Google
| generally knows whether a query was initiated by voice or
| typing. Instead, I think it's because most users find
| what they're looking for faster with it.
|
| If you have terms you don't want interpreted broadly you
| can put them in quotes.
| bluGill wrote:
| Most people are not precise enough in their terminology.
| Zach_the_Lizard wrote:
| Google "helpfully" ignores the quotes sometimes too.
| They're not the hard and fast rule they used to be.
|
| I preached the Gospel of Google when the competition was
| composed of web rings and Altavista, but Google in its
| infinite wisdom has abandoned the advanced user with
| changes of this nature.
| jvolkman wrote:
| Pretty sure quote support has improved recently.
|
| https://blog.google/products/search/how-were-improving-
| searc...
| thfuran wrote:
| So what is the gospel de jour, or are we forsaken in
| these benighted times?
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I find voice-assistant often useful for using the phone
| such as opening a given setting, say make the display
| brighter. Trying to navigate the settings pages is very
| error-prone. There seems to be no universal standard as
| to where each setting should be found.
| shanebellone wrote:
| This is actually an interesting point. In the Army, we
| used terms that limited ambiguity thereby increasing
| efficiency. Even if one eliminates the complexity of
| language, there's still a specification problem.
|
| I only use voice assistants to set alarms. I cannot
| imagine voice as a primary input. Then again, many have
| opted out of owning desktops and laptops in favor of
| mobile phones. That also seems terribly inefficient.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Then again, many have opted out of owning desktops and
| laptops in favor of mobile phones. That also seems
| terribly inefficient
|
| A lot of people don't _need_ computers in the general
| purpose sense. I admit my mind boggles a bit when co-
| workers tell me their kids don 't want a computer to do
| their school papers because their phone is fine. But,
| then, I'm used to keyboards and what we think of as a
| "computer" and have been using one for decades--and grab
| one when I can for any remotely complex or input-heavy
| task.
| em500 wrote:
| > A lot of people don't need computers in the general
| purpose sense. I admit my mind boggles a bit when co-
| workers tell me their kids don't want a computer to do
| their school papers because their phone is fine.
|
| I grew up in the 1980s, when handwritten papers were
| still the norm. I do see the advantages of using a word-
| processor for writing papers, but don't see why it would
| be a necessity (at least, until University).
| icapybara wrote:
| I think the implication is that the kids use a word
| processor on their phone.
| [deleted]
| moffkalast wrote:
| It sounds ridiculous, but I'll admit that when you've got
| something like Dex that lets you dock the phone for usb
| and hdmi out and gives you close to a full desktop OS I'd
| imagine it really is enough for the casual user.
| ghaff wrote:
| I certainly know colleagues in the industry who travel
| with just a tablet and external keyboard. No, they're not
| running IDEs etc., but they find it OK for emails,
| editing docs, taking notes, etc. Personally I'll spend
| the extra few pounds to also carry along a laptop. But I
| can imagine not needing/wanting a dedicated laptop when I
| travel at some point.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Is a tablet and keyboard really much lighter than a
| laptop?
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/20/21227741/apple-ipad-
| pro-m...
|
| Suggests a keyboard and large tablet is heavier than a
| laptop
| everdrive wrote:
| The obsession with being lighter definitely has
| diminishing returns. At some point another few ounces
| doesn't make any difference in a real, practical sense. I
| think have just started to associate "lightness" ==
| "better" despite there being no actual benefit past a
| certain threshold.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Right at some point. But at the current point my tablet
| is too heavy to hold in hand for more than 20 secs
| perhaps. Phone is ok. Tablet is not (for me). I only use
| tablet by placing it on table or a stand. Then actually
| using a laptop is much better than a table.
|
| The killer-tech will be when we have a tablet that is as
| light as phone.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm usually carrying a tablet anyway though for
| entertainment/reading purposes. So it's usually a choice
| of tablet + laptop vs. tablet + keyboard. (I admittedly
| don't really have a weight optimized travel laptop these
| days either.)
|
| I actually do wish there were good Mac or Chromebook
| choices for a travel 11" or so laptop but the market
| seems to have settled on a thin 13" as the floor and,
| admittedly, the weight/size difference isn't huge.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| While I am mostly a Mac person, for travel I often prefer
| a tiny and cheap Lenovo Chromebook that does everything
| (a bit poorly): Linux containers for light weight
| programming and writing, consume media like books,
| audiobooks, and streaming.
|
| In response to a grandparent comment about weight for
| tablets: I prefer Apple's folio old style of
| cases/keyboards because of weight. I have one for both my
| small and large iPad Pros. Whenever I travel, I usually
| just take one of my iPads if I don't need a dev
| environment [1].
|
| [1] but with GitHub Codespaces and Google Colab,
| development on an iPad is sort of OK.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I still don't see the point of tablets. It's just a
| smartphone with a larger screen, and practically all
| people already carry phones.
|
| Might as well go for the laptop at that point given that
| it can actually do far more imo, unless you ditch the
| phone and go for one of those half phone half tablets I
| guess.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'd rather watch movies, read, play certain games, etc.
| on my tablet than on a phone. (Obviously there are also
| specific use cases like digital art.) That said, I mostly
| use my tablet when traveling and it's a distant third in
| necessity compared to either a laptop or a phone--and
| only somewhat more useful than a smartwatch.
| everdrive wrote:
| Watching movies on a tablet is terrible, though. All
| methods for propping the device up so you can watch the
| movie are inferior to the way a laptop screen props
| itself up via hinges and a base.
| ghaff wrote:
| On a plane I'd rather use the tablet in my lap than have
| to put the tray table down. And in a hotel room I'm
| watching on the couch if there is one. (I do also have an
| attachment for my tablet that will let you prop it up on
| a table but I mostly don't use it because it adds
| weight.)
|
| For reading, I'm probably bringing my Kindle along if I
| don't bring my tablet.
| pfdietz wrote:
| How old are you? Because larger screens become really
| nice as your eyes go bad. And I don't need the full size
| of a laptop for things I'd want to do on a tablet.
| mod wrote:
| I bought a surface for that reason. I like the
| portability, and it is just a normal PC with a pretty bad
| keyboard.
| psadri wrote:
| I agree with this. We have evidence that natural language
| works well enough to run most of the world. AI will
| eventually get there.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > humans have been fine using natural language to delegate
| commands to each other.
|
| Not always resulting in unambiguous instructions:
|
| "Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the
| front, follow the enemy, and try to prevent the enemy
| carrying away the guns." ~Lord Raglan, Balaclava
|
| "I wish him to take Cemetery Hill if practicable." ~Robert
| E. Lee, Gettysburg
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _On the other side, humans have been fine using natural
| language to delegate commands to each other._
|
| On the other hand, legalese exists and is the lingua franca
| of telling people what to do, and math exists.
| missjellyfish wrote:
| > On the other side, humans have been fine using natural
| language to delegate commands to each other.
|
| And that's why all of aviation has moved to a tight
| phraseology, such that delegated commands are universally
| understood and their meaning is set in stone.
|
| Natural language has cost many lives.
| stubish wrote:
| > On the other side, humans have been fine using natural
| language to delegate commands to each other.
|
| Using language to instruct humans goes wrong all the time.
| Just a short while ago on British Bakeoff I saw 2 of the
| contestants make white chocolate feathering on their
| biscuits by making actual feathers out of white chocolate
| and placing them on their biscuits. And I'm sure that will
| confuse quite a few people reading this too. It certainly
| confuses image searches. Language is a fuzzy interface.
| Compare to interface like clicking on a button that does
| the thing I want done.
| Closi wrote:
| How would you (easily) describe the concept of chocolate
| feathering to a computer without using natural language?
| (e.g. if you wanted the computer to generate an image, or
| search for an image of / recipe with chocolate
| feathering).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > humans have been fine using natural language to delegate
| commands to each other.
|
| Every time we try to minimize errors, we formalize a
| language. I don't even think people use natural language to
| issue commands often. Commanding people is often considered
| rude.
| ska wrote:
| > On the other side, humans have been fine using natural
| language to delegate commands to each other.
|
| I think this is really a characterization. Mostly human
| communication is full of errors and problems.
|
| What is true is that when it is important enough, humans
| have come up with ways that minimize communication errors
| and frameworks to deal with ambiguity - mostly these
| involve training and effort though, it really doesn't come
| naturally.
| ska wrote:
| "really a problematic characterization"...
| pjc50 wrote:
| The problem is that it's not actually a conversation. To
| significantly improve it, you'd want to:
|
| - identify users by voice
|
| - ask them clarifying questions
|
| - remember the answers on a per-user basis
|
| - understand "no, that was the wrong answer"
|
| If you're going to provide a formal interface to the
| computer, you also have to provide teaching in that formal
| interface, which is far more of a burden to the user than the
| cost of the device. And we've completely moved away from that
| model (not necessarily a good thing, but that's what the
| market has chosen).
| enobrev wrote:
| Calling it a burden is an assumption that ignores and
| belittles the end user. Sure, there are people who won't
| want to train their personal ai.
|
| But I imagine there are significantly more who would
| appreciate clarifying requests by a teachable assistant
| capable of interacting with the entire digital world on
| their behalf, efficiently and intelligently.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| I think you're right. There are glimpses of this in the
| voice interfaces right now. For example, Alexa will
| distinguish between voices and preferentially take actions
| for me, saying "Play Music" plays Spotify, and for my kids,
| it plays Amazon music.
| bombcar wrote:
| I'd be perfectly happy with a list of Siri commands that _I_
| would have to learn to be able to do things. I don 't care if
| I ended up sounding like:
|
| Hey Siri
|
| Turn lights on 50 percent
|
| For one hour
|
| Dim over that time
|
| Play music.
|
| I can learn what I need to do; JUST LET ME KNOW THE MAGIC
| WORDS!
| LooseMarmoset wrote:
| It's like playing Zork all over again.
| toxik wrote:
| But with the added complexity that sometimes the speech-
| to-text will just crap out completely.
| LooseMarmoset wrote:
| Alexa, turn on lights
|
| ...I don't know how to do that
|
| Alexa, turn lights on
|
| ...What do I turn the lights with?
|
| Alexa, activate lights
|
| ...I don't know what you mean
|
| ...It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a
| grue.
|
| ALEXA TURN ON THE DAMN LIGHTS
|
| ...I don't know the word "lights"
|
| ...Oh no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a
| grue!
|
| ** You have died **
| bombcar wrote:
| Siri, turn on bathroom lights.
|
| Downstairs or upstairs bathroom?
|
| Downstairs.
|
| Sorry, I didn't understand. Downstairs it upstairs
| bathroom?
|
| Downstairs bathroom.
|
| Sorry, I didn't understand. Downstairs it upstairs
| bathroom?
|
| Cancel.
|
| Ok. Cancelling.
|
| Siri turn on downstairs bathroom lights.
|
| (Turns off all lights)
| gernb wrote:
| For me, about once a week it's
|
| "hey siri?"
|
| (no response, no icon),
|
| "hey siri?"
|
| (no response, no icon),
|
| "hey siri?" (louder)
|
| (no response, no icon),
|
| "hey siri?" (louder and slower)
|
| (no response, no icon),
|
| reboot iphone 13 pro
|
| "hey siri?"
|
| works
| spookthesunset wrote:
| "Did you mean 'bathroom LED' or 'bathroom'?"
|
| Because god help you if your device names are similar to
| your room names...
| bombcar wrote:
| I've taken to naming my lights things like Greg, The
| Beacons, etc.
|
| And I added scenes so I can say "Gondor calls for aid"
| and the beacons will light.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes. And it may be worth noting that Zork is literally
| something like 50 year old parser technology.
| guestbest wrote:
| A lisp compiler in a voice assistant would seem like an
| improvement in that the user could define objects and
| then express the actions to be performed in the same
| room. But these assistants seem to drop objects between
| commands making them hard to program conversationally.
|
| I guess a list like language would be ideal and the
| pauses would be like parentheses
| wkdneidbwf wrote:
| i don't know that you can do exactly all these things, but
| is this the use case for custom routines in the amazon
| ecosystem.
|
| you great the prompt and add one or more actions to take.
| everdrive wrote:
| I highly doubt there is "a" magic list. I'll bet the magic
| list changes constantly.
| bombcar wrote:
| I noticed a drop in usability about the time they went
| with ML.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Same with the predictive keyboard, it feels more random
| now.
| ics wrote:
| Not to take away from your point (I'd like the magic list
| too) but to some degree, this can be worked around using
| Shortcuts. If you use inputs, Siri will prompt for them
| which is a bit slow but you could even use a dictate text
| and parse yourself if desired.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > we shouldn't regard formal language as a burden, but rather
| as a privilege
|
| What the hell? Is riding public transport or riding a bike
| either a burdain or a privilidge? Is Driving a car?
|
| I am trying to control shit in my home, it should be neither.
| duggan wrote:
| Dijkstra's full essay[1] is a bit more illuminating, but
| essentially it's about how, for example, developing a
| system of symbols and formal language around mathematics
| has allowed "school children [to] learn to do what in
| earlier days only genius could achieve".
|
| 1: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06
| xx/E...
| em500 wrote:
| I think his argument even generalizes to literacy in
| general. Remember that reading and writing skills don't
| develop naturally (as opposed to spoken language). They
| require a large educational investment, and used to be
| reserved for the wealthy and the privileged.
| gernb wrote:
| Natural language conveys information to other people just
| fine. So the problem isn't that "Natural language is a
| fundamentally wrong vehicle to convey information to a
| computer". The problem is getting the computer to understand
| natural language to the same level as a human.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| They just can't do useful things for me. I can do things like
| turn off a light or get the weather which are only marginally
| better than just flipping a switch or pressing one button on my
| phone. It's not a large gain in efficiency.
| vintermann wrote:
| That's right, they're doing it for big surveillance.
|
| Though, as much as these services are apparently bleeding, the
| in-kind payments from big surveillance had really be worth it.
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| i don't want my voice assistant to be a sock puppet for a
| corporate identity proctologist.
|
| can you imagine hiring a production assistant that gave
| everything you asked them to do to a corporate competitor ?
|
| Why would I want to do that with my life and Amazon and Apple ?
| [deleted]
| nkrisc wrote:
| I wrote off Siri when I was driving and said "play episode 6 of
| XYZ podcast" and was completely incapable. If it can't do
| something like that, then what's the point? It's no different
| than those hands-free Bluetooth adapters for your car that my dad
| uses for his old android phone.
|
| There are many other seemingly simple tasks it has failed at. All
| I use it for now is sending texts and turning in navigation when
| I'm driving.
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