Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is not just that it is wrong, nor that it doesn't have enough personal information, but that it lacks proper personalisation and the ability to learn.

You can't reply with "no Siri, not that London" and have it remember. It doesn't learn your voice among the people who normally use your Siri in your household.

"Artificial intelligence" is always going to make mistakes, as do real humans. Humans can perform unsupervised learning - in fact it's one of the key skills that employers like to select on! Until AI can learn in context it's going to be very limited.

View on HN

Siri indeed never learns.

I've had to disable "Hey Siri" because my daughters name is pronounced vaguely similar to Siri. Worst thing is, Siri transcribes what it hears, and it transcribes my daughters name. So it doesn't hear wrong; it just activates on a different name than Siri.

I've tried telling Siri to shut up; but it never learns not to activate when I call out my daughters name.

It activated when I greeted my cat. My cat is called "Timmie"

That might be because the activation words are recognized by a separate chip (so it's low-power and works offline). Whereas the rest of the conversation is with the software service.

At least that's what I heard about how iirc Alexa works.

Activation words are fuzzy by design.

Siri is easy enough so we never looked much into it, but “OK Google” for instance looked like a real PITA, so we did some research before buying an assistant.

It appears a ton of people just intentionally say “Ok GooGoo”, “Ok Boogle” etc., whatever is easier for them to pronounce and it works perfectly fine.

When those designs strip your privacy, 'fuzzy by design' is cery much a bug to the user, and only a feature to the company mining the data.

I may be biased as I helped a voice recognition internal project in a previous life.

It’s a genuinely hard problem to solve, and I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Apple for instance when they have humans reviewing samples. There may be other motivations, there’s ton of people in any of these companies, any given feature must be seen from a different angle depending on the department looking at it.

But I think a lot of what we see as privacy violating is primarily an effect of the flaws and all the hacks needed to make the feature work at all (when it works).

Siri is not artificial intelligence-it is speech-to-text + a poor search experience with one result.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com