The Google Assistant is going global
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blog.google
However so far Google voice assistant hasn't worked great for me. Most of the time it gets it wrong. It is really frustrating while driving. I am a native English speaker, albeit Australian.
I've made this comment before - it is astounding that Google have banked their entire reputation on people getting a positive experience through saying "Ok Google".
Amazon have Alexa. Apple have Siri. Microsoft have Cortana. If any of those become a negative experience overall, they can just invent a new AI with a new name.
But at the moment, saying "Ok Google" ends with me having an experience of frustration or disappointment. This is a big risk with your brand?!
You can breakup with Siri and stay with Apple. It's going to take an amazing Google Assistant to over come the hundreds of wasted voice experiences I have suffered thus far.
Good luck, Google.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find this kind of statement concerning? Google literally controls all of your data and you're forced to rely on them for services.
How would they recover their access to their other accounts? Do they have backups of the information they rely on? What is the burden or cost of this risk?
Basically the plan is to own your domain name, and build things around email that can be moved to any provider.
There's also a high danger in a loop there, where your own domain supplies the email address that controls the domain.
And if you don't go with that approach, what email provider do you then trust to provide that external validation point for the domain.
I don't see how you can escape the risk.
One thing you can do for DNS and your host provider for your mail server is use a separate gmail account that forwards to your normal domain. It's unlikely that you'd lose both your DNS / mail server AND access to that independent gmail account.
I wish service provider for essential services allowed more than one email. A work around is to setup up more than one "root" account, each setup with a different email provider.
I never really heard about someone getting banned for being a bot on Apple services.
I tried everything, emails, FB forums, twitter, etc... Even wrote a message explaining the issue on top of my picture I uploaded. It finally worked after about a month, after I just uploaded the same picture again one more time.
If you allow people to login with one of those system, make sure to provide an alternative that has no dependency on anybody else.
Sometimes you get lucky and there's a company with a decent privacy policy but still no end to end encryption.
There are virtually no products with "okay" full encryption and federation (eMail and torrent like protocols for sharing big files are the two I can think of).
Is it really that crazy to operate in one ecosystem like that? Is spreading my data over a couple massive companies somehow worth it IRL? I doubt it.
Keep in mind to use some of Google's paid services, so you get proper customer support, just in case. (GSuite, Pixel, GCP, Ads)
I think the dev community will start looking at hard forks as the new 'true' path rather than Nexus/Pixel if they continue down this path. It's already prevented me from buying the new pixel, what's the point of having the latest vanilla Android if it's going to spy on you anyway
The best way to let them know is to open the Google app, open the menu and choose 'Send Feedback'
As a French Canadian who changes languages multiple times a day and who refers to things in both languages constantly, this is really great.
The only thing I still miss to use the assistant all day long is offline routines. I put my phone on flight mode before going to bed and having the possibility to say "OK Google, wake up" to enable Wi-Fi and have the Google assistant telling me about the emails I've received during the night would be great.
For instance, multi-user as yet to come to non-English languages, and it's been out for almost a year.
This may solve some problems you're speaking of.
Ubiquitously on, sound-tasting devices do not fill me with glee.
Not to mention getting it to play Malfeitor by Watain on Spotify...
I actually bought my Google Home in Belfast and brought it to Dublin because they're still to get in the Republic of Ireland. Yet it seems to find the southern accent easier and any location based stuff I've used it for here works fine.
Still feels like magic sometimes.
No comment
Some of us really don't want voice controls and always on microphones.
That being said, I feel both G.Assistant, and Alexa both interpret what I'm saying most of the times. In contrast, Siri rarely understands me well. When I set up reminders, 95% of the times Siri fails to comprehend me correctly.
I don't know what they are doing at Apple, but you would think they would have nailed this already (with the millions of Siri capable devices they have sold already).
Happy to hear about more recent tests or counter examples!
(Disclosure: I work at Google, my Google Home tends to get my Canadian English pretty well)
This is actually quite a significant problem across the board, since Brazilian Portuguese keeps drifting apart in both formal and informal vocabulary and grammar. They pretty much walked all over the language accords of the past couple of decades (both academic and governmental), and some of the more strait-laced linguists in the Continent wanted to classify it as a creole (partly to annoy their counterparts in Brazil).
Voice UX for English, where linguists and AI and money are being thrown, is still very much in its infancy. Let's give them a little time.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States
I suspect the only reason Chinese is categorized as a single language is ignorance and Eurocentrism. German and English have roughly the same lexical similarity as Cantonese and Mandarin, for example. Considering Chinese one monolithic language is like considering all European languages dialects of "European."
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/11b0fg/til_f... [1]: http://dx.doi.org/10.5353/th_b3178970
Ignorance, perhaps, but not necessarily Eurocentrism. Viewing Chinese as a single language – often with Mandarin as a prestige "dialect" of it – is a common position of Han nationalists.
Attempts by some Western linguists to treat the Chinese varieties in a way that emphasizes their mutual unintelligibility and downplays the importance of the common writing system, have even been attacked by said Chinese nationalists as being "anti-China". It is very similar to how, decades ago, many Russians bristled at attempts by foreign scholars to view Ukrainian as a language in its own right, since their position was that Ukrainian and Belarusian are simply some aberrant or low-prestige forms of the Russian language.
Just saying, unless you talk about written Chinese, the big languages in China are not even intelligible amongst each other - less so than English, French or German. They are not dialects that can be trained together, they are very very distinct languages. (Of course official CCP-speak says the opposite, but they have never been fans of facts.)
But just in case, I want to make clear that by "the official dialect of Mandarin", I meant the one dialect of the Mandarin language that is officially recognized by the CCP. Whereas by "Chinese" I meant the language spoken by almost everyone in China nowadays, i.e. Mandarin (I did that because I was replying to a comment that was talking about Chinese, so I used their wording).
Thus, with a correct understanding of my intentions, the equivalent for English would be "Unless you limit yourself to the official dialect of British English, English also has lots of inconsistencies ..." (where the official dialect would be the Received Pronunciation).
I've heard Chinese ex-colleagues how characters are so much better instead of icons on smartphones... Maybe they just wanted the messy system where most of population can't write a grammatically correct sentence (oh, you can read Chinese, but I can write!) to be useful somewhere...