Comment by tjl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tjl | Hacker News Reader

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Alexa is basically an audio command line. You have to say things specifically. Plus, Alexa is pretty restrictive in that it only needs to handle English (and American English at that). It also has a limited set of things it can do since it's only audio.

With Siri you can actually mix languages. So you can ask in French about an English film title. I don't know how good Alexa is about these kinds of things. Considering that it's only for the US, I can't know.

I don't know if Google Photos is running circles around Photos. I know a new version just came out with macOS Sierra. I just read an article today over on Six Colours that praised its search capabilities. I don't use Google Photos or Apple's. I haven't had a camera in years and only got my first cell phone this year (I was given an iPhone 5).

I completely rule Alexa out from these kinds of discussions until Amazon bothers to sell it elsewhere. It's been a consistent issue with Amazon. It took several years before we got the Kindle in Canada, we were promised Amazon's MP3 store, but we're still waiting. Our Amazon Prime only covers shipping, not any of the books or video.

Siri does what I need it to do on my phone, but I don't really ask for much. I mainly use it for timers and creating appointments. Those have all worked perfectly, even when I'm standing right next to my kitchen fan or the speakers of my stereo.

Hm, interesting. Well, as I said, I don't know personally (I have neither an Apple device nor Alexa), but that was my impression from what people who love Apple and also have Alexa and Google Photos say.

As for Google Photos, it makes mistakes, false positives mostly (as a funny example, for my photos so far it consistently thinks cats are dogs, although it also recognizes the same cats correctly) and sometimes it's too “eager” (“cars” will produce results where cars should be but are not actually in the photo). Sometimes it makes bizarrely trivial mistakes considering how smart it is generally: it categorized photos of human cadavers and anatomy specimens I made at the local university institute of anatomy as “Christmas”, I guess because they were made on Christmas day. But it will correctly find true positives. It also correctly visually recognizes notable places globally (that is, without geotags) and various things, concepts etc. even if they're a completely marginal subject in a photo. One thing that impressed me was a cat video it edited out of multiple clips with almost perfect music some 5-10 minutes after I uploaded the first items and started using it.

People are pretty happy with Alexa, but I've heard it's pretty strict in how you say things. The 3rd party extensions require you to ask things with specific phrases which makes things a lot easier to handle, but it's harder for the user.

The post about Apple's Photos I found linked on Six Colours, but it's on Macworld [1]. In it, he searches for a zebra and it gave his few photos that he took of zebras at the zoo. So, that worked well, but the search for dogs made the same mistake as you state Google Photos made (cats mistaken for dogs). So, I think that Apple's Photos is probably somewhat close to Google Photos, but maybe not quite as good. It's not exactly Google running circles around it.

[1] http://www.macworld.com/article/3122966/macs/6-photos-featur...

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