Comment by tikititaki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tikititaki | Hacker News Reader

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While I can't speak for Siri, Google's voice recognition continues to surprise and even frighten me. And if you go online and look up deepfakes or AI generated voice of famous people, it also is freakishly accurate.

Sure, there are some issues and most of them still fall somewhere in the uncanny valley.. but we are just starting to fully exploit this technology. AI that people don't tangibly see but make a giant impact in their lives is for example the Facebook algorithms that decide what shows up on your feed.

When a large subset of the population gets majority of their news from Facbeook, Facebook has effectively created a mechanical system that decides what a large chunk of the population is aware of. I don't think people fully realize what effect that has had on our entire society, including elections. The future will only see more of this type of thing.

I'm always disappointed with Google Asistant. When I say "navigate back home" it tries to route me to a company called "Home". Great job. I've included a hint "back". I've never been to a company called "Home". I'm after work. This is a fun example, but I never get good results. I say "weather" and it shows me the weather, just in a different city. FFS. Maybe in the next 5 years I'll be finally able to do something using voice commands. Right now I just want to smash my phone.

Fair enough. Usually when I use "Navigate to the nearest gas station" or "navigate home" or "set an alarm for 8am on Tuesday" it all works perfectly for me, but I concede I don't use the feature that often so perhaps I've just been using it for well-adjusted commands.

That's the convolution of two problems:

a) Good general-purpose automatic speech recognition, which was an unattainable holy grail for DECADES. Previously, you would have to record a lot of your own voice to train the system for you in particular before it was at all reliable. Now it basically just works.

b) Making good use of the results of (a). Your examples are clearly in this category. This is ALSO a very hard problem; voice interfaces are basically brand new creatures, and I expect we'll be seeing 'best practices' form up for a while yet.

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