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Comment by robbrown451 | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't see the problem with it if they were open about it and allowed opting in and out.

I use Android phones, and there are many times I wish there was a human listening, usually when I am cursing at the OK Google lady for being so stupid. (yesterday: "no you idiot, I'm not going to tap one of the options for gas stations, isn't it f*ing obvious I'm driving a car??!!!")

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> I use Android phones, and there are many times I wish there was a human listening

Google does the exact same thing to train the “OK Google” functionality. Apple wasn’t mechanical turk-ing Siri, this is about humans tagging prerecorded data for ML training datasets.

Yes I wasn't suggesting that Apple or Google were having humans actually process the requests real time. My wish that they were listening would be satisfied if, months later, someone heard my frustrated response and there was a way they could register that in the ML training set or otherwise register that so that product designers could see it. (in the example above, it is more of a product design issue than a ML issue)

That's actually what I am hoping for -- I'm not trying to make a minimum wage employee miserable, I would like the actual software to get smarter. (and maybe make the AI Google Lady a bit unhappy, if that is possible)

It seems to me the limitations with assistants aren't voice recognition but NLP. If I have to craft my query for a machine then you've failed to make a 'natural language' input.

I agree (mostly) but not sure how that applies to my comment. Yes my major frustrations with it is that it isn't able to form a helpful response, not that it gets the actual words wrong. And in the case above, it goes beyond that. Designers of the product (Google maps) have it present onscreen options you need to click, in response to a spoken request (e.g. "find gas stations on my route") that is likely to be by a person who is driving and should not have to look at a screen. I would argue that that is not just non-helpful, but irresponsible and unsafe.

But I guess you are right, in that if they have the transcripts, they don't need to actually listen to recordings. Then again they might need to listen to recordings if they are trying to gauge user frustration.

> It seems to me the limitations with assistants aren't voice recognition but NLP.

You probably speak English with a common American, Canadian, or British accent. Quality for common-accent English is fairly high, but is much lower for people with thick accents or who are speaking languages with smaller available training datasets. These sorts of initiatives are mostly about bringing quality up for those demographics.

That's very true but I wish they'd work on making a better product as well. The growth in that area seems stagnant from both Siri and Google

I've learned that you can say "Feedback" and Google Home will let you dictate some feedback.

I don't know if anyone is actually listening, or if it's just being thrown into a huge dataset somewhere, but it's something.

Recently GHome broke reminders for me. I'm still upset about it.

It goes into your Google Feedback account along with any feedback you've left using one of the "send feedback" links on many Google products.

https://www.google.com/tools/feedback/

You can't opt out anyway, everyone has a smartphone and many have Siri and other services activated. If Siri didn't occasionally activate by accident in meetings I wouldn't even be really aware of that.

You opt out by not using the service, which is what I've done since the beginning.

This "clever trick" is not a valid opt-out under the GDPR.

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