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Comment by dkonofalski | Hacker News Reader

Oh great... another self-driving car project... /s

To me, this just feels like another jump on the bandwagon. I have an Echo and, while it was awesome at first, with all the skills and everything it feels less amazing than it did when I first got it. Now, I feel like it mishears us all the time, it doesn't give the answers we'd normally get unless we say things in a very specific way, and all the cool tricks ("Who is the mother of dragons?") are just gimmicks now.

Unless Apple can actually make their version useful and able to understand questions that aren't formed in "robot" as the language, I don't see the point of this.

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I've found the Home useful. All I can use the Echo for is to set multiple simultaneous kitchen timers and to play music while cooking. The Echo just doesn't seem to be able to handle natural language well or there isn't support for what I'm asking.

I use my Alexa also for listening to Baseball which, correct me if I'm wrong Internet, Home can't do.

I have no idea where one would listen to baseball, but Home has the ability to play radio stations at least through TuneIn and iHeartRadio: https://support.google.com/googlehome/answer/7071793?hl=en

One of the examples is playing ESPN Radio.

Multiple kitchen timers is by far the most common use case I have for my Home. Not coincidentally, it's also my #1 complaint. Google, when a timer goes off, please please just tell me the name of the timer that is going off. Does the Echo do that?

Unlike the self-driving car project, a voice-driven assistant is not an option for Apple. It's an essential piece of the next-gen OS, and if they get locked out of it, the iPhone is not going to be enough to save them. They need to be in the car and on the TV (and everywhere else), and voice is key to that kind of ubiquity.

They are convenient voice command lines. It's faster to speak your timer, ask the weather, play music, or remotely turn off lights than to fiddle with your phone.

Sure... if you have them memorized. Most of the time, the Echo doesn't understand what I'm saying unless I phrase it exactly the same way each time and it pretty much is me learning through trial and error what lines work and what doesn't. Siri, at least on my phone, seems to get natural language better.

> Oh great... another self-driving car project... /s

Hmm?

Apple was thinking about doing driverless cars of some sort after Tesla and Google. They seemed to be taking employees from Tesla and Ford for a while, but recent rumors are that the project has been halted.

They also registered the domain apple.car

The grandparent is likening Apple jumping on the bandwagon after competitors' cars to them jumping on the bandwagon with the speaker.

Well, that's just silly.

It feels like this is jumping on a bandwagon. How many competing smart home speakers do we really need? It's just like the situation with self-driving cars. How many players are there now? Waymo, Intel, Uber, Apple, Yandex, Lyft, Tesla... how many of these do we need?

I don't understand this mentality. Apple often enters into "crowded" markets and then establishes either a clear winner, or a strong contender. The market's existence removes any question of whether people are buying, so... what's the problem? They just shouldn't do it because other people make them already?

Lots of others make laptops, smartphones, headphones, set-top boxes... and yet, and yet. They still turn quite a profit.

How many of those self driving cars actually exist as a commercial product at this point? So far, zero.

We "need" one one supplier of self-driving tech for each large global car company. That's how previous technology transitions in automobiles have worked: usually everyone eventually figures out to build "it", whatever "it" is.

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