After getting a home one of us can just say "Ok google, play The Next Generation from Netflix on the TV" while walking towards the couch. It plays the next episode right were we left off yesterday.
One of us gets up to go to the toilet, normally it means screwing around with the phone, and oh look, the chromecast disconnected from the phone so we have to reconnect again. It's easy to spend a whole minute just to get the damn episode to pause.
After getting a home it's just a matter of saying "Ok google, pause the TV"
Reality: if you have a slightly non-standard accent, you will be shouting at your device five times before anything happens. While I could just have pressed the play button on my Apple TV remote and be done with it (no fiddling with a phone necessary).
Then there are all kinds of cultural realities that are apparently not considered in Silicon Valley. My favorite five pet peeves:
(1) Our family name is 'de Kok'. Very often these assistants totally mess up when I ask e.g. to call family (either they start complaining about dirty language or literally search for 'cock').
(2) We are a multilingual family, languages used in our household are German, Dutch, and sometimes English. None of these voice assistants work with multiple languages. So, the only alternative is to choose one language and stick with it. Unfortunately, if you choose English you are having a hard time navigating in Germany, looking up a German TV program, or calling a Dutch or German friend. If you set the language to German, you forgo looking up shows on Netflix by their English titles reliably.
(3) Usability goes down the drain once you have kids. Voice assistants typically do not work well when multiple people are speaking at the same time. If you are lucky, they are just confused, if you are unlucky they start doing whatever they infer from a semi-random mix of words. You cannot tell your three year old to be quiet, because mom or dad has to tell Siri what to do. (I use Siri sometimes, and our daughter currently likes to scream 'hey siri' repeatedly when I use Siri.)
(4) Voice assistants are unusable in most environments where there are other people.
(5) Voice assistants, especially in-house voice assistants are a potential privacy violation. So, you have to ask people that visit you if they are OK with your conversations being recorded (accidentally or intentionally) and switch off the device if they do mind the latent spying.
tl;dr: voice assistants only work well in monolingual families where all of the family members have a perfect accent and where none of your acquaintances mind the privacy violations.
Edit: added some more annoyances.
Edit 2: heavy downvoting :/. Please explain why!
So, bachelor Silicon Valley engineers.
I don't know about Google Home or Siri, but my Alexa easily handles my broad Norwegian accent the vast majority of the time.
There are a few things (e.g. weird album titles) that are more likely to cause problems, but in my experience the things that it has problems with are rarely accent related as when something is problematic my son who does not have a comparable accent runs into the same misrecognition.
(EDIT: I have no doubt that there are accents it will have problems with - my point is that you certainly don't need to have perfect pronunciation for this any more)
> While I could just have pressed the play button on my Apple TV remote and be done with it (no fiddling with a phone necessary).
That requires finding the remote first. You may be organized enough for that never to be an issue. I've given up on the normal remote and rely exclusively on apps now, but that also involves grabbing my phone or tablet and a couple extra steps.
> (4) Voice assistants are unusable in most environments where there are other people.
That's fine. They don't need to be usable everywhere. I have no interest in using one on my phone in public for example. But I like having one in my living room, and I rarely have enough people around that it's a problem. In my experience with it so far, people have already learned to hush down automatically when they hear you give the keyword (but I do agree that won't work with a lot of people present - it works with a few people around).
My TV is so old the remote is still wired to it. Finding the remote is never an issue.
Indeed, and "perfect accent" varies from device to device. My wife and I are both from the Atlanta, Georgia area, yet we have distinctive accents; hers is much more "Southern" than mine as I grew up in several different states across the Southeast and Southwest, whereas she lived in the same house from birth to college, then moved back after graduating.
We've found that her Nexus 6 understands me better than her even though she talks to it far more often than I do, and the reverse is true for our Shield TV despite it using the same backend as the phone. She has to try two or three times to get her phone to understand a command, where I can get it right the first time. On the Shield, I will tell YouTube to look for "funny cat videos" and I get "funny hat videos" every damn time, while she gets cats.
Still, the cyberpunk motto is bound to become true.
The downside was that it had a lot of buttons, 90% of which you don't use. It also tended to get lost a lot. And we didn't have Netflix, so either we'd have to use video tapes (which was cool, insert and hit play), or DVDs (which were a bit less usable, they usually had unskippable warnings, trailers, and some weird menu you had to get through before playing the movie / TV show). Or just watch what was on TV at the time, which worked just fine for us because we'd eat and go to bed at set times.
My tl;dr point is that things just used to be simpler and more usable. I don't like having to use an app to start stuff. I don't like the four remotes I have lying around atm either (TV, set-top box for digital television, one for the soundbar (idk why it's that big), and either a controller for the ps4 or for the apple TV. The latter two kinda fulfill the same role though, as a netflix machine.
I also notice my new microwave sits there and keeps chirping at me after heating food until I open the door, it's not as loud and as insistent as the washing machine, but still totally unnecessary behaviour.
A more sensitive soul could eventually be driven bonkers if every flippin' thing in your house and car beeped and booped at you every minute of the day.
I think once you've spent enough time submerged in technology, you start to appreciate the simpler things in life. A smart washing machine or microwave isn't one of them.
Simple and usable is still possible, but you have to do your homework.
I should probably stick with free software and non-DRM content.
Having said a that, I do use the Echo Dot to do hands free timers (like when I'm cooking), calculations in general and for cooking ("Alexa how many tablespoons are in a quarter cup"), look up definitions of words (while I'm sitting on the couch reading a book), and my kids ask it how to spell things. (The only reason I have one is I got it for free at AWS re:Invent conference.)
For me, these smart hubs won't be particularly useful until I can combine a bunch of functionality into one thing. I have the heating set to come on in the morning, but our morning schedule is irregular so I have to adjust it most evenings to come on a bit before we wake. Then I set the lights to come on, as I find it easier to get up when it's light, and set an alarm. What I want is just to say "wake me up at 5:30 tomorrow" and have all that just work.
The individual things (alarm, light and heating) are all individually beneficial though, despite the evenings faff. This is also only a minor problem too, these are not daily herculean tasks I barely make it through, but it's still a level of hassle I'd like to smooth over.
You can still make things simple and easy. What we are seeing is a complete lack of trying. Probably because those companies just love to have an always listening microphone inside your home, 1984 style.
The smart-tv is almost as bad, I'm just going to connect an actual computer to the TV and be done.
The best is at night before going to bed, I can say 'Alexa, turn off downstairs' and that will turn off all lights, lamps, speakers, amplifiers.
But yes, I can also tell her to play some music thru the speakers, and 'Alexa, turn on speakers' and the music automagically starts playing on the stereo.
Then there's all the other bits, but the timers we use really all the time, the 'Alexa, what's up' in the morning is pretty nice too...
"Alexa, play some soft rock"
"Alexa, set a timer for 10 minutes"
"Alexa, skip this track"
"Alexa, how long do I boil an egg for"
It also makes it so that I'm not saying when he gets out but a device is saying when he gets out. He doesn't tend to argue with Alexa but he will argue (negotiate) with me so it helps in that way.
I also use it to play music and read books to me. In the future I'm going to set it up to work with my smart home, but I haven't set that up because we're selling our house. Was it worth the price point? No, but now that I have it it's become part of my daily life.
Tons of opportunity for innovation/products here. The only downside (besides the need for server voice processing) is that you are building a company on a platform. The whole Twitter and Facebook platform debacles showed the risks of trusting your business life support to a bigger indifferent company - who may just steal your idea and implement it.
Our high school, due to having no cafeteria for a while, ordered once or twice a week hundreds of pizzas from several pizza places.
And we have a professor at our university who always promises to give everyone free pizza if more than 25% of the class are still there the week before the exam. Sometimes it works, sometimes too many fail.
But ordering many pizzas, especially online, is possible.
Although some places will call you back to confirm