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rosstex

Me: Hey Siri, what cheese goes well with fruit?

Siri: Here's what I found on the web for "What cheese goes well with fruit..."

Me: Hey Google, what cheese goes well with fruit?

Google: "Edam"

View on HN

"Is Obama planning a coup?"

Siri: Here's what I found on the web for "is obama planning a coo"

Google: According to details exposed in Western Center for Journalism’s exclusive video, not only could Obama be in bed with communist Chinese, but Obama may in fact be planning a communist coup d’etat at the end of his term in 2016!

(Definitive answering style is not always better...)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/03...

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-home-claims-obama-plan...

At least Siri acknowledges that it doesn't have the information necessary. Google Assistant comes up with an answer, but it might as well have picked a cheese at random. It's not like there's a universal cheese that pairs with all fruit.

Would you have felt satisfied if you asked, "What wine goes well with dinner?" and heard "Zinfandel" in response?

An actually useful AI would ask you what kind of fruit(s) you want to pair it with. Not throw out an answer at random.

> At least Siri acknowledges that it doesn't have the information necessary.

I've had two failures in recent memory where Siri recognized the queries correctly, but completely misinterpreted them.

"What's <time> Eastern Time in Pacific Time?" => time in Pacific, MO.

"Increase volume by 10%" => lowered volume to almost 0.

The latter failure took me a while to figure out: Siri had interpreted my query as set volume to 10 (out of 255?). Indeed, "increase / decrease volume by X" had the same behavior.

Also, asking Siri to play a particular song whose title's in Japanese might as well be asking it to play a random song. Setting its language to Japanese helps a little, but then of course I have the inverse problem. I wish I could switch Siri's language settings verbally, or be able to say "In <language X>, <query in language X>."

I assume you're trying to say that Google's answer is better, right? Google's certainly being more authoritative, but the answer to your question is actually fairly subjective, there's more answers than just "Edam", so IMO surfacing search results is better than just having Google pick one answer.

Google's also been known to produce completely incorrect "authoritative" answers.

If you are speaking to your device for this kind of question, the authoritative answer is what you want. You expect me, after taking to my device, to go over and pick it up and search through web results? If I wanted to do that, I wouldn't have asked the question by voice in the first place!

An "authoritative answer" that may not be true, has no context, and may have been put there by SEOs or propagandists, is worse than no answer at all.

The authoratative, wrong answer is what I want? Or, what if I ask, say, which actor is the best in the world? Is there any authoratative sounding answer that is of any value?

I believe you have failed to understand the original point you are replying to.

"Edam" might be authoritative, but it is not correct. The problem isn't simply that the answer is fundamentally subjective, the bigger issue is that there's not enough contextual information in the question to even arrive at an answer that one could consider subjectively correct.

I replied elsewhere, but it's like answering the question "What wine would pair well with dinner?" with "Zinfandel". Without having even a vague idea of what's on the menu, you're just picking a wine at random. Maybe it's correct, maybe it isn't. But being authoritative when there's not enough information to actually speak with authority is not the right answer here.

The agent should then ask for more information; not point me to a web search. In most cases, the authoritative answer is what I'm looking for and the question less likely to be this subjective.

The thing is Siri won't give me an answer either way.

Nobody's arguing that sending you off to search results isn't particularly useful. We're just pointing out that authoritatively answering a nuanced question without enough context isn't any better, it's just differently wrong (and in some cases, strictly worse).

Whether or not Siri or Google Assistant correctly and authoritatively answers more (or more relevant) questions is a completely different topic than what's being discussed here.

For the record, this exact search with Google Assistant did not provide an authoritative answer for me and instead gave a bit of a voice summary and a link for more information. This is still way better than just directing me to the search with no more voice feedback.

I have an iPhone, sometimes use Siri, and I prefer Google's answer. Simply, if I asked a verbal question, I prefer a verbal response. If I ever ask Siri a question, and I get the "Here's what I found on the web" answer, I consider it a failed operation, and I take a different tack.

He didn't ask, "What cheese goes best with fruit?" he said "goes well with fruit." So Google's answer is technically more correct. The best kind of correct.

We've already seen the problem with Google confidently giving answers that it got from searching the Web.

"Hey Google, is this batshit conspiracy theory I heard about true?"

Google: "Yeah, sounds right"

You: Hey HN, what cheese goes well with fruit? Me: Which fruit?

Siri: "Oh you have a question. Let me Google that for you."

IF ONLY, instead it uses bing....

Edam! Stilton surely.

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