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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone _actually_ use these voice assistants regularly (other than when it first came out)? If so, what for?

I find most people just use Siri to ask questions to show it off and see if they can get some comic relief from the answers... and then curse the rest of the time when they accidently activate it.

I do use voice-to-text quite often.

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I mainly use it in two ways (in order of usage): 1. To set reminders and timers, 2. To find quick answers, ie. I actually _just_ used it to find out what time sunset is and it answered fine. I might sometimes ask it a bit more complex things like "What time is the GSW game on tonight?", but anything research-related or more challenging questions, I leave to Google.

My biggest gripe with this whole voice assistant thing is is, when I think of a query, I usually _want_ to Google it because I enjoy going to Wikipedia (or some related article) and reading about it myself, picking out the sections I find interesting and reading about them, which sometimes leads me deeper into other areas of interest. I don't find that joy when an AI tells me what I want to hear. That's my biggest limitation to using these things. That and Siri never understanding me.

exact same usage. 90% of my usage is setting alarms/timers/location or time based reminders. Voice instructions are a lot easier than ANY interface for that stuff.

No, their limits are too apparent too quickly, and frankly I'm often using my phone in a situation where I don't want to talk to it. We need subvocalization mics for this kind of thing, because standing around talking out loud to our devices is going to get old in a hurry.

I use mine for one thing, and one stupid thing only: Locating my phone. If I shout "OK Google", the screen turns on, and if I shout "Turn on the flashlight" or "Play <music>", it lights up or makes noise anywhere in the house. That's about it for me.

I use Siri for exactly three things - setting alarms and timers, asking what time it is and asking to play a movie/tv show (those last two only on the apple tv, the first of those being handy when I'm not wearing my watch and my phone is on the charger - i don't have any clocks anywhere in my apartment)

Edit: Amusingly the asking it to play a movie thing failed miserably when trying to get it to play "The Babadook". It insisted on spelling it "Ba Ba Duke", which obviously did not have the desired effect.

"Set alarm clock to 6 a.m."

"Set brightness to maximum."

For me, it's only these two. The last one is very useful, as I set the brightness to minimum to read in the dark. If I next try to use my phone in daylight, there used to be a catch-22 in which it's very hard to see anything on the screen before restoring brightness, but I couldn't restore it without seeing.

"Set alarm clock for 4am" is also a great prank that you can use on someone's locked phone.

setting alarms in the morning without having to wake myself all the way up with that bright screen is the best. While it's plugged in, I can wake it up using just my voice.

In the car, I use it to open my music player, I just wish I could tell it to play too. I set reminders and calendar all the time, so I basically never forget stuff anymore.

Also weather, sports scores, looking up facts while talking to someone (so I don't have to get out of the convo and stare at the screen).

Setting alarms and timers -- way faster than using the UI.

Set timers and Calendar. It's great for that and almost only that.

I wish there was a way to spell out some uncommon proper names, though.

i use it to open the camera app because i never find it fast enough

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