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Comment by kilo_bravo_3 | Hacker News Reader

Siri doesn't know that my front door is called "FRONT DOOR".

I only have one smart lock, which works perfectly, and it is called "FRONT DOOR" in HomeKit.

When I ask Siri about my FRONT DOOR she responds that she cannot find it.

When I ask Siri about the status of my DOOR, she responds with "The FRONT DOOR is locked/unlocked".

I'll then say 'Alright Siri you literally just used the phrase "FRONT DOOR" five seconds ago and the text transcript on the screen says "FRONT DOOR" hey Siri is my FRONT DOOR locked'

Siri: WTF are you talking about? You don't have a FRONT DOOR.

"Hey Siri is my door locked"

Siri: Your FRONT DOOR is locked.

Google and Alexa handle things flawlessly.

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About once a week Siri and I have this conversation:

Me: "Siri, turn off the bedroom lights."

Siri: "OK. Your 6am alarm is off."

For the most part Siri works for me, with the exception of the above and her insistence on adding "ginger ale" to my grocery list as two items.

/Native English speaker, specifically trained in non-regional diction because I used to work on-air in radio.

That conversation sounds like Siri thinks you're about to go to sleep and wants to make sure you remember to enable your wake-up alarm.

No, that’s what Siri says when it disables your alarm lol.

She wants you to get more sleep so she's disabling your alarm.

>Native English speaker, specifically trained in non-regional diction because I used to work on-air in radio.

Well there's your problem (/s): https://youtube.com/watch?v=Avp9aUkM5g0

It could be worse. It could have said "OK".

In the past week:

me: "Hey Google, add half and half to the shopping list."

gh: "I've added those two things."

-----

me: "Set an alarm for 2:30 tomorrow"

gh: <generic alarm set response>

...

wife at 2:30AM: "hey... HEY... why's the alarm in the kitchen downstairs going off?"

well you specifically said 2:30 tomorrow.. it sounds like it triggered at 2:30 next day

And never-mind the literal interpenetration of the command - it's far more usual to set up an alarm very early in the morning (got to catch a plane, unusual event) rather in the afternoon.

Very true. I hadn't specified AM or PM as to when I wanted to start the dinner roast. :-/

Me: "120 degrees Fahrenheit in Celsius"

Siri: "Contacting emergency services in five seconds"

To be fair I was in a noisy environment and Siri only got the "120" part but seriously, why would that be okay? My phone is registered in America with an American phone number and English set as it's only language. Why should it think 120 is equivalent to 911?

Looks like 120 is the emergency number for ambulances in China, emergency at sea in Norway, police in Guatemala, and national police in Bolivia [1]. Alternatively, maybe it interpreted "120 degrees Fahrenheit" as a body temperature reading for an extremely high fever?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emergency_telephone_nu...

I was having problems with a phone service where I needed to "press 1 to continue," but it wasn't registering. Eventually I ended up pressing 112, and my iPhone displayed "Calling emergency services," even though it's an American phone in America.

I know some countries use 112, but that's too many edge cases colliding.

In fairness here, 112 is an international standard (I think it's in the GSM spec?) and is expected to work in the US.

I guess that makes sense. But it doesn't explain why the iPhone intercepted those digits when I was punching into a phone menu system.

It's nice to see that using siri is a normal thing to do :) People at work make fun of me for using it.

Not in my experience. This is how 80% of my Google Assistant conversations go:

Me: "Hey Google, play Nine Inch Nails, you know, the one in my Google Play library"

Google: "OK, playing Nine Inch Snails, a band nobody on Earth has heard of and is definitely not in your library!"

Me: (Repeat a few times, trying all kinds of accents, eventually I get tired of songs about nine inch somethings, and I pull the car over and type in by hand what I'm looking for.)

And what bugs me the most about the Google Play Music Library is that it won't sync up with the YouTube Music Library... They have two different music services which I can use with one subscription but I can't have some of the songs on both of them or have one single library.

You're going to have to, as they're going to merge

https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/05/16/how-to-transfer-pla...

Thanks for calling this out! I guess I really should check regularly for every Google service I use if it's being discontinued yet.

There's that Google Graveyard site, maybe they should make an aaS out of it, e.g. you can do an API call with services you use, and it will respond letting you know if any of them is about to be euthanized by Google...

Weekend project idea right there!

Ah but Nine Inch Snails is a classic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qQ1pomYzk

This seems, to me, to be something else. Google Music consistently avoids playing the most popular version of a song. It's always a cover by no one, or a different song by no one with the same title. I've started to think it's a royalty thing.

All these speech assistants are almost stateless, aren't they? I mean, they can ask you questions and go into a listen-for-an-answer state, but, at least last time I tried, you can't have a conversation about your conversation with them and improve their comprehension of anything. It's like talking to a command line, or those old Palm Pilots you had to learn a special alphabet to scribble on.

It's quite interesting to hear very small children talk to voice assistants. Probably not surprising, but it seems like in normally-learnt human communication you expect your conversational partner to remember the context of what you were saying, and carefully forming canned commands is a separate learned skill. It suggests these voice assistants have still got a way to go, and it seems more like a paradigm change, a big leap, than just incremental improvements.

> you can't have a conversation about your conversation with them and improve their comprehension of anything. It's like talking to a command line, or those old Palm Pilots you had to learn a special alphabet to scribble on.

Which is why I have no confidence calling it AI if its not even intelligent. Its just voice recognition on preprogrammed operations.

>Which is why I have no confidence calling it AI...

That's because it really should be called Simulated Intelligence, and would be a much more accurate description. The marketing team wouldn't like this though.

Are they even simulating intelligence. To the parent poster's point it's really just simulated voice recognition. No intelligence even gets simulated. This is more like running cucumber scripts based on voice recognition.

It's an artificial idiot, plain and simple.

your average idiot is intelligent. your average digita assistant can barely assist and has no fingers.

yeah, that's what I'm wondering about - is it going to be hard to implement things like this until LSTMs with better "memory" get good enough for consumer use?

You can‘t even have the „thank you“ „you‘re welcome“ part of the dialogue.

Honestly, I can forgive the lack of context awareness. That's a hard problem. I have issues even getting consistent responses to the same query over time (even back to back in some cases). Sometimes, Siri will misunderstand me and fail to do the thing, but then I look at the text that's transcribed...and it's correct (I.e. the backend was replying to a different transcription than I saw on the frontend).

I've just been trained to not bother. Unless I'm setting a timer, I just don't try anymore.

When i made a meeting room reservation chatbot the hardest part was managing a conversational context without the user getting stuck.

In the end I had a “draft booking” and a conversation loop, where the bot would repeatedly ask to fill in missing parts (eg nr of participants) and then give you a summary and opportunity to correct things. It was hard to do, and definitely required a lot of contextual understanding of how people book meeting rooms. That approach doesn’t scale up well.

I think the basic problem is being stuck in a local optimum. The scripted bot approach doesn’t scale to complex conversations, and you need to start from scratch to do better.

Ahh the good old "conversation is a state machine" pitfall. Even linguists I work with do that sometimes, I guess it's how the simple models that we're taught with work.

Wanna have the simplest parser? Finite State Automaton to the rescue! So people automatically assume that a the simplest approach yo conversation is also something like a finite state machine.

Here's the thing. The only reasonable FSA would be a clique.

You can always move between nodes.

A much more feasible approach is the "actions competing for repelevance" one. Where you have global state manipulated by actions, and all the actions generate a "appiccability score" for the given user input. The system then chooses the most appropriate action, and it does it's thing. And on the next user input the cycle repeats.

I don't know if it works there, but siri couldn't understand one of my contacts names

When it read back super incorrectly from an alias, I said something to the effect of "could you pronounce that correctly?" and it asked me to say it

Since then, it's understood that person's name. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It really needs to expose the option to train those easily

Indeed, you can say "That's not how you say that" to correct its pronunciation of any name.

There is a "Pronunciation" field in the contact where you can spell out how a name is pronounced.

This article clears everything up, https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8116586

Similarly, I have two smart outlets and one smart lightswitch in a room. One is called "Drew's LEDs", and the other is called "Drew's Heater". When I ask google to "Turn off the lights!" it turns off the switch and the "Drew's LEDs" smart outlet, but not the "Heater" smart outlet!

I definitely appreciate the effort they put into understanding the semantic nature of a device from the name I assigned it. Nowhere did I ever designate one of the smart outlets to "behave like a light."

Scary! I would never have anything involving heat (oven, space heater, etc) or water connected to the IoT. Way too much risk of fire or flood from a bug or a hack.

The people who cut my grass are in my phonebook, under, let's say "Lawn Cutting Corp".

If I say "Siri, call lawn cutting corp", she'll say "I'm sorry, I can only call a single person at a time."

If I say "Siri, call lawn corp", then it immediately opens the phone and says "Dialing lawn cutting corp."

What's most likely happening here is that any door can be classified as "front door", and Siri doesn't know whether you want to open the door which has been marked as "front door" (you have none?) or the one named "FRONT DOOR".

File a bug and it will probably be fixed.

My computer is a laptop, which is on my desktop, and there is a desktop on that laptop, and on the desktop is "My Computer".

I think I just made a palindrome of homonyms.

is it named in capital letters? I've noticed some systems will see capital letters and read it as F-R-O-N-T etc. Maybe try renaming the door to lower case

At this point better stop using Siri and just check by yourself no :D ?

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