Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by veesahni | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

veesahni

Google's voice recognition is excellent. I trust Assistant to help me throughout my day with a number of things now:

- Cooking & laundry timers

- Reminders (remind me to do X when I get home)

- Directions (Take me to the nearest X, take me home, etc)

- Checking hours of business (what time does X close today)

- Initiating phone calls (Call X)

- Checking weather (is it going to snow today? How cold is it right now?)

- Conversions (what's X ounces to ml)

- Quick stock checks (what's X stock price)

- Playing music around the house (play X on the kitchen speakers)

Additionally, I've found myself using Android's voice recording capabilities to dictate text all the time. It's just so much faster than typing or swiping.

I haven't an iPhone for a few years, so I can't compare with what Siri is capable of today.

View on HN

I use Siri a fair amount from the Phone (mainly in the car or kitchen to be honest).

Going through those:

- Cooking & laundry timers - Yes. Works well

- Reminders (remind me to do X when I get home) - I find Apple geofenced alerts to be unreliable.

- Directions (Take me to the nearest X, take me home, etc) - Pretty good, search isn't as good as Google, but good enough these days.

- Checking hours of business (what time does X close today) - Never tried, doubt it would work.

- Initiating phone calls (Call X) - Yes - Works well

- Checking weather (is it going to snow today? How cold is it right now?) - Yes, works well

- Conversions (what's X ounces to ml) - Never tried. Just tried now - works OK

- Quick stock checks (what's X stock price) - As above works OK, says whether there has been a fall or rise.

- Playing music around the house (play X on the kitchen speakers)- works very well.

Checking hours of the business works well. The integration with Yelp has that done pretty well.

I've actually been super impressed with Siri. You can have it call you an uber, get the leading scorer from your favorite hockey team, contextually ask followup questions about a person you were searching, etc. I haven't used Siri in a long time (besides timers, weather, etc) and it has come so far since I did.

Sounds like I need go get a favourite hockey team lickety-spit.

its the Toronto Maple Leafs

I use it for these things, they're ok. I occasionally try to get it to control an app, it usually fails, but that's my dream state: I'd like to be able to say, "Hey Google, open app X and do Y task."

But I don't know if there's enough incentive for apps to add an assistant interface. How easy is it to add commands on your app that it will accept via assistant? Are there common APIs or structures for this to shift the incentives, allow it to proliferate app by app, rather than waiting on the assistant developers to manually do each one?

After that we need to go back to Aza Raskin's project, uh, Ubiquity? Anyone could build little scripts, verbs, that helped build a natural language input from the ground up. That's how we get to stuff like, "Hey Google, take a screenshot of news.ycombinator.com and email it to Joe."

I can open app and ask for actions on Google assistant on my Pixel phone. I use things like - "Play <song> on Spotify" - "Send message <message> to <someone> on WhatsApp" - "Take a selfie or screenshot"

Maybe app actions are only available on Pixel devices.

No, they are available on all devices (at least on my Nexus 6P too). It's only a matter of which apps are implementing the "Actions on Google Assistant" and for which operations.

Oh true, I shouldn't have been so universal.

I want every app to start thinking about voice ux, but that's probably down to the individual apps, and you're right that some do. I can play some things on Stitcher, say, though I can't remember if I have to use podcast names specifically or if I can use my playlist names.

Some Google apps don't seem to support it though.

Ok Google, log my weight on Google fit as X? Search results page.

Ok Google, play (my playlist name) on Google Play: plays unrelated radio station inspired by my playlist name, with sometimes comical results.

I'm sure it will improve with time.

> Are there common APIs or structures for this to shift the incentives, allow it to proliferate app by app, rather than waiting on the assistant developers to manually do each one?

I think once somebody finds a good API for that, it will be a watershed moment.

Amazon Alexa has apps called "skills", but they expose their own voice interface which is always inconsistent.

I always thought that Android's intents could be a good API for voice commands. It actually surprised me that we never really got much deep app integration with voice on Android phones given that API.

Google's voice recognition is excellent, and fuck Samsung for putting that stupid Bixby crap and getting in the way.

Sigh. That’s the main reason I won’t move to the s9. I already have an iPhone and Siri just sucks. Why would I want another sucky assistant? It’s like hiring the wrong person... twice.

I really wish the manufacturers would only have a few features, like weather or timer or location (home, work, school) that were truly bulletproof in execution. It feels like they are trying to do too much most of the time when I just want them to not suck consistently so I can actually use them reliably.

Get a Pixel2. It feels like an iPhone did 5-6 years ago.

> - Reminders (remind me to do X when I get home)

One thing it can't do is 'remind me to do X when I leave work'. Can siri?

Yes and it can also remind you to do something when you "get in the car" or "get out of the car", if you have it paired to your Bluetooth in your car.

But what none of them can do is what people actually need, which is "remind me to do X before I leave work".

What signal could it pick up on before you leave work besides when you get in your car or after you leave somewhere?

Sudden increase of movement (via the accelerometer) around the time they usually leave work, for example.

If I usually leave work around 5-6 and I start packing up my bag, that could be a signal.

Would you use a Markov model for this?

Interesting. I guess I thought that discussing how to model a software problem would be an acceptable and interesting conversation on HN. Do any of the downvoters care to contribute in a productive way? I'd be curious to hear what people found disagreeable in my question.

It could guess and or extrapolate, based on recent data.

For a lot of people it would be effective.

Nest is already pretty effective at learning schedules

Nest doesn't have to be accurate to the minute to be effective. A reminder based on before I leave work would be.

For instance, if I don't know what time aim getting off of work and I wanted a reminder to call my wife when I got to the car, it could do that completely accurately based on phone connecting to the car. It could only guess about doing something before I left work.

Yes. "Hey Siri, remind me to bring a change of clothes when I leave home." just now created an appropriate item in Reminders.

which will, of course, trigger the reminder as you walk down the street away from home, forcing you to go back and get the change of clothes that you forgot.

Android's voice typing has been weird for me. It used to work pretty well offline, then a few months ago all the punctuation stopped working. Now it's working again and the overall recognition is better than ever.

same here. Last year punctuation didn't work for a few weeks.

All of those Siri can do. Anything else?

This is strictly anecdotal but a friend of mine is an exec at Facebook and we were recently discussing phones. He had an iPhone for a few years and has now had an Android for a couple years. He said that by far the most drastic difference between the two platforms is Siri vs. Assistant (or whatever Google's assistant is called in the phone). He said it is no contest how much more useful and functional Assistant is, compared to Siri. We did not dwell on this discussion and I otherwise find him an objective, un-biased user of the two platforms, so there you have it.

Obligatory question is why? What usefullness or functionality made that much of a difference to him?

Cant speak for the other person, but as someone who's used iPhones exclusively since the original, Siri makes mistakes with sufficient frequency that it's subjectively just bad. I can't quantify what percentage of requests fail to be understood correctly, but it's sufficiently high that the frequency is annoying. It's even worse when using the Apple Watch (Series 3).

Unexpectedly, this can sometimes be a positive too. "Hey siri, turn my lights <pink/orange/purple/blue/red/white>" has on multiple occasions been interpreted as "Hey siri, turn my lights", which then results in the lights being turned off. This is hugely entertaining when you're demonstrating your new Philips Hue bulbs over FaceTime, and the person on the other end now just sees your camera go black instead.

I often want to set a timer for exactly 50 minutes so I know when my laundry is done.

But siri always interprets "Fifty" as "Fifteen". Pretty much every single time, it always makes the same mistake, no matter how clearly or slowly I try to pronounce it. I have to say "Hey Siri, set a timer for five zero minutes" to get it to pick it up accurately.

I also have that problem, but I say 51 minutes instead.

Do you have any accent? By that I mean are you a second language English speaker? I just presumed that it couldn’t understand my accent heavy speeech.

I'm a native English speaker, though whether I have an accent depends on your perspective! I can do either American or British somewhat convincingly, and I usually don't have any trouble being understood by Siri.

I suspect the problem with "50" is that whatever ML underpins it is heavily tuned/biased towards "15" because a lot of people probably set 15 minute timers all the time. 50 minute timers are much less common, I suspect?

Americans think I sound British. British think I sound American. Siri fails less often when set to British instead of American for me, but still fails too often regardless.

Maybe saying 49 or 51 would work...

It certainly does work, and I did that until I discovered the "Five zero" trick. It's just "Fifty" that it has a problem with!

Walt Mossberg has a funny "series" on his Twitter where he screencaps all the blatent failures he has with Siri. Many times, he or a follower will attach a screenshot of Assistant completing the action. It's not scientific by any means, but it's fun to go through and provides some concrete examples. His biggest issue seems to be that Siri is unreliable - there are queries that work, but only sometimes, and that makes the experience of using the product terrible.

If Apple engineers who work on Siri were required to do all of their corporate communication with Siri exclusively, Siri would rule inside a year.

That is assuming they were trusted to work on it instead of report to status meetings, or meetings to their dotted line manager, etc. Apple was built around Steve. It’s going to take a while.

That remark is relevant for so many products!!! That's why Toyota invented the Toyota way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way

I want to like Siri but I spend so much time correcting what it has misunderstood, it's nearly not worth using it.

The Google alternative is, from what I understand, something that just works.

But it's not personified to the degree Siri is. I noted this elsewhere in the thread.

Doing that bit of theatre, with some humor, pop culture relevant things, even just good responses, appears to matter more to people than "it can do it", and "it actually did it" hit rates.

OK Google needs a name.

Google is this big, smart thing. People get that.

But, "Ask Siri" has less friction and appears easier to identify with than giving an order to a corporation is, "OK Google."

Maybe just, "Hey Google" would make a subtle difference.

And, in typical Apple fashion, "Ask Siri" is all you need to know to attempt it.

Further, discovery has error. If that can be best guess, combined with some fun, people will play.

"OK Google" lacks these human friendly connotations.

A name would be a follow, hard for Google, but... If it were me, I would flat out own that, get the name, and run ADS. "We hear you... meet [name not common, familiar sounding, friendly, easy to say.]"

There has to be either an old world name with good connotations, or a variant that is catchy, fun, gender fluid.

Lol, use goog. Mostly kidding, but a tiny bit serious.

Better, much better is out there.

Or, let the user name it. Why not?

"OK Google, can I call you inigo?"

"Sure, I will answer to inigo. And OK Google when I'm not properly introduced, OK?"

I'm not a huge fan of Siri's 'jokey' personality, but I could live with it if it actually worked. As it is, it just feels extra frustrating to have a 'personal assistant' that is extremely dumb and cracks jokes.

Oh, I agree. Don't use it myself.

Got downvotes, but it seems to me Google has the superior product. True for me and how I use it anyway.

Add in a little personification, and it's nothing but win, IMHO.

So far, I've seen people like the bit of theatre related to Siri. Whether we do or not isn't necessarily the point.

Or, let the user name it. Why not?

Supposedly these devices have low-power chips that can only recognize certain pre-configured names (like "OK, Google"), and then wake up the main CPU to do the rest.

Ahh, didn't know that. Makes a ton of sense.

Personification is an antifeature to me. I find the named Siri and Alexa to be juvenile and mildly embarrassing.

"hey Google" does work

I always found the phrase ok Google simply awkward to pronounce

How about continuity of communication between Google Home & Phone.

In my kitchen, I can ask Google Home "how far is X" .. and it responds with a distance/time and pops up a notification on my phone to initiate Google Maps navigation to the target. Useful if I'm in getting ready to go there.

Does Apple's HomePod have any such continuity with an iPhone?

Siri misunderstands me so frequently, I've learned to not use it for most of the above things.

This is what I experienced years ago when I last had an iPhone. Google's voice recognition is exceptional. I can mumble words and it still seems to contextually figure out what I was probably trying to say.

Siri can't do two countdown timers at once, such as what I need when cooking.

It's bonkers to me that this is still a limitation on a phone that lets me track a dozen-plus world clocks, as though it's a more common use case.

Yes Siri can after 5 tries and figure out the wording.

Go try the Google assistant and get back to us that Siri is equal.

Yeah, Siri doesn’t hear as well. It can’t pause music by me asking it. It also has some annoying bugs:

http://h4labs.org/siri-next-monday-isnt-christmas/

Another one is when Siri tries to update an existing reminder when I say “create reminder”

I have Apple Music and I’ll often use my little Echo Dot when I want to play a song just because I can simply talk to Alexa from across the room and it will hear me.

I’ve started using Siri to control music when I drive. “Hey Siri” followed by “pause music”, “next track”, “go back”, “play music” all work as expected.

can do, not will do.

I've yet to meet anyone who got siri to do anything, let alone useful, on the 5th try. I can mumble microcontroller part numbers to google, or other odd non-standard words/phrases and 90% of the time its correct on the first try; half the time i'm astonished that it even was able to figure out what i said

It's not that it can do it.

It's how reliable it is when it does it. I use both iOS and Android, and Google Assistant is so much more reliable that I find I use it. With Siri I find I end up having to intervene so often it isn't worth it.

I do have an Australian accent, so maybe that is a factor.

All of those Siri can do maybe half the time. In my experience, it's a completely unreliable service. Sort of embarrassing when your voice assistant can't perform the most basic possible task on an iPhone: locking the screen.

I keep hoping Siri will work on something like "How long is <Store/Restaurant> in <City> open?". I don't know if Google or Amazon succeed here either.

I ask Siri for the closing time of different stores all the time. "Hey Siri, when does X close?" works for me. On Siri most things don't work for me but that does.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com