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Comment by abruzzi | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only person who finds talking to these personal assistants profoundly uncomfortable? Like I've spent all my life learning how to interact with a computer, and now these companies want me to interact with it like it's a human (which I'm not very good with anyway) but it's not a human. Instead it exists in this uncanny valley where it sounds a little bit human, but its cognition is so completely limited that I have to turn myself into a limited cognition robot to communicate with it?

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Yes! I was just going to post almost the identical comment. I detest talking to computers, whether personal assistants like Alexa or Siri, or the voice-control systems on the other side of a phone call. Apparently computers don't much like talking to me, either, because they never understand what I'm asking. I usually resort to just saying 'representative' over and over again until I get through to a human... And yeah, it all feels incredibly stressful.

More than once I've opted to give up on a service that requires me to say stuff out loud over the phone. Flight information services, for example. "If you want to look up flight info, say 'flight information'." Nope, I hang up. If it were Press 3, I'd happily use it.

I'm not sure what it is, but talking to computers just makes me wig out. I get extremely self-conscious, wondering who is listening or might hear me. This doesn't happen with humans on the other end.

It took me a few weeks/months to get used to Alexa and I have to say, it's really nice to be able to come home and say "Alexa play some music" and she always knows I want some nice Jazz. When you say it in the morning, she plays morning music. It's nice.

Saying "Alexa 5 minute timer" is also convenient. "Alexa, weather" is less convenient because she doesn't know that I prefer Celsius over Fahrenheit. This is unfortunate, but at least she can do a conversion.

But then you do an "Alexa what's the velocity of an unladen swallow" and she won't even perform a basic Google or WolframAlpha search and give you the first result. Just says she doesn't understand. Lame.

Before all that, though, I had a lot of essentially stage fright whenever that Alexa blue light came on.

Same thing happened when I started using Siri after I was already used to Alexa. Invoke the voice thing, and the prompt comes on, and I am awash in stage fright, unsure what to say.

It's weird.

>> "Alexa, weather" is less convenient because she doesn't know that I prefer Celsius over Fahrenheit. This is unfortunate, but at least she can do a conversion.

There's a device-level setting in the mobile app to set Alexa's preferred system to Metric...

I know. It doesn't affect temperature for some reason.

Or I'm growing senile and didn't actually try that when i thought I did.

Works for me. Mine started out giving me F but I switched it to C no problems.

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