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Comment by adoxyz | Hacker News Reader

If it's anything like Siri, I'll pass.

Went back to the iOS ecosystem last year after being in Android/Google land for the past decade. I used Google Assistant on a daily basis easily 20-30 times and 99% of the time it got me what I needed. Siri can't even do a 1/10th of the things I used GA for, and that 1/10th that it does, it does so poorly that I don't even bother anymore.

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What sort of tasks were you using GA for?

I use mine to turn a smart plug on or off, and set a timer when cooking.

Nothing else I've ever wanted to do via my Pixel 2 is reliable enough to waste time trying.

Sending a WhatsApp while driving is the one thing I keep wanting to do, but it's hopeless.

Basic things that I feel like should be trivial for Siri to handle. The biggest issue by far is how bad the voice dictation is for sending messages. It almost never gets it right.

I'm not opposed to an Apple search engine if it works. Would happily use it. But the way Siri has stagnated doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence for me.

That's odd. I use Siri with CarPlay in my car and a very low-quality mic from an aftermarket headunit, and it's able to capture probably 80%, if not more, of my voice-to-texts when I'm trying to text people hands-free.

The only real issue Siri has there more often is when I ask it a more complicated query for playing music a certain non-trivial way, like "Play music by X from their latest album" or similar.

A lot of it comes down to your accent. It seems like Siri is trained well for a very particular voice, and if you fall in that range it works great.

If you fall outside that range... It might get one in three words correct.

For example, the memorable time I was letting my boss know I was running late because of what Siri chose to transcribe as "sick cunts".

(It was my children who were unwell.)

> But the way Siri has stagnated

Well, maybe most people just don't find it that useful, as an idea, rather than as an implementation? I don't personally find myself wanting to talk to my phone, and I certainly don't want smart speakers listening to everything I say and giving it to intelligence agencies or whatever.

Personally I agree. But other people are happy with that interface, so IMO Siri could have been a game changer. It had the potential to eat a big part of the web and give Apple dominance over it.

Failing to take advantage of that early lead has been one of the biggest failures of the Cook era.

I suspect the search engine effort is actually part of making Siri better. To do that they need the data to analyse, which means scraping and indexing, which is search. Might as well wraps that in a UI and nail two birds with one stone.

Siri often fails even switching lights on and off, it can be very idiosyncratic in how it does and interprets stuff

It also sometimes takes 10+ seconds to respond when I'm at home with a great internet connection. You'd think Apple would have that down by now...

I asked Siri to turn on my lights today. I was told that I did not have any lights set up. Then I rephrased my request to turn on the lights. "Coming right up".

Of course, there's also the regular "I'm sorry, but some of your devices did not respond" response from my Watch, forcing me to issue the same command to my iPhone for it to work.

I also get this one with HomeKit all the time!

The underlying implementation must have basically no error case handling, because half the time I open the controls I'll get "device not responding".

Or perhaps it throws errors far too often, because often I will ask for it to do something, it will do it, and then claim than an error occurred.

I ask my google assistant random questions. "How long does Orange Juice last in the fridge?", "What is ____". I'm pretty sure it just uses Google Search's featured snippets, but it's usually correct and understands me. Like the other poster, I wouldn't bother asking Siri the same questions.

Adding stuff to lists is definitely super useful when you remember something as you're cooking or hanging around.

I used to use GA to set reminders, then Google killed that for paid users for some reason.

Yes, this annoys me so much still. THAT was my one killer use for it.

The effort of migrating an email address I've used for over a decade just to get this one feature back doesn't quite make sense, but I'm considering it...

[Disclaimer: I work on Google Assistant. I just started though; I'm much more of a user than an engineer at this point.]

I use it a lot for media stuff. "Play <song> by <band>", "Watch <TV show> on Netflix", etc. My wife is very fond of the combined alarm + YouTube functionality: "Wake me up at 7:00 AM with deep meditation music". My toddler has learned to say "Hey Google watch videos of dump trucks". I use it a bunch for basic productivity stuff too: "What's my agenda for today?" "What's my agenda for tomorrow?" "Check my e-mail".

I have a lot of Google Nest Minis and Hubs throughout the house and love the experience. There isn't much it can't do and I'm constantly impressed by how well the GA can match intent to action.

My toddler can’t turn Google Home on. He have probably tried over 300 times the last year. Seems like it is not trained on enough child voices in foreign languages. I had to record my voice for him on the iPad, so he can use it. Just with the short “Hey Google”, in Norwegian.

He pronounces it correct. The only difference is the high pitch/tone of a child.

I've had reliability problems with my toddler as well, and I suspect it's the treble voices. My primary device (for him) is an LG TV, though, which is push-to-talk. As long as he holds the mic up to his mouth properly it'll usually get what he's saying. (It probably also helps that he's speaking American English).

I don't think my Nest Hub Max or Google Home Mini has ever caught the "Hey Google" when he says it, but it doesn't really matter for our use-cases with him.

I wonder if it's by design? If I was building a home assistant product, one of the cases I'd build defensively against would be kids saying "hey google delete all emails"...

Maybe I'm out of the loop, but when Alexa/Google/Siri started coming out in home-accessible versions, I did think there was a beat missing in terms of recognising a voice-print (if such a thing is possible) or similarly requiring some form of authentication.

Do you really want your toddler to be able to turn it on though?

My 4 year old daughter can get Home to play her favorite rhymes and cartoon on our TV using chromecast. We are non-native English speakers(desi) and dont use English as our primary language at home

On what planet is talking to your phone easier or faster than taking 2 seconds to tap the your email app and skim the headers O_o

Some phones and earbuds have dedicated buttons for this, making it faster to use that than switch between apps.

On my Pixel 4 it's just "squeeze to talk", which is super convenient (and also doesn't interfere with the "Hey Google" on my smart speaker). It's marginally faster to open e-mail by voice than by tapping, although not hugely so.

Does it need to be faster or does it just need to feel faster?

Google Assistant really wow'ed me when, to settle a dinner table debate, I asked "Ok Google, on the TV show 'Friends', what was the name of the game show Joey hosted?" Before that, I'd never engaged with this device, which we got for free as part of a promo, and which sat on our bookshelf doing nothing.

It truly amazes me that GA is able to give a relevant response here. First, Joey never hosts it, he just auditions for it. Second, GA reads a paragraph or so from IMDB's summary of the one episode where this happens.

Very impressive, IMO

(It was called 'Bamboozled')

Google is surprisingly good at answering questions like that. The rise of voice assistant really has pushed them into improving their knowledge graph and condensing search results into a single sentence. The conciseness has been getting even better too. I notice often it'll actually give a one word answer, followed by a 1-2 sentence context.

For example, I asked "what kind of soap can I use on my cats" and it gave a one word "castile soap" followed by the sentence. (I actually Googled it, and it's like that on Search too).

It's super useful when you quickly want an answer to something you were wondering. A nice touch is also how it sends the link to your phone to look deeper into it.

These are things that seem obscure, but thousands of people are probably asking already. Try asking it something that would easily be answered by a traditional keyword-based search engine, like how to install the alsa-firmware package in Ubuntu. The entire result set will be about alsa-firmware-loaders.

I mean, assistants are basically voice UI's for any service.

Google has a huge knowledge graph so naturally they'd be better at answering questions, but I think between Google Assistant and Alexa the race to win will come down to integrations/partnerships with third parties.

So Amazon, then.

>and which sat on our bookshelf doing nothing.

I seriously doubt it was doing nothing. I has been listening the entire time you had it connected. You might not have utilized it, but it has utilized you.

Yep. The GA is basically our household's sole interface for Netflix at this point, among other uses like lights and thermostat.

I use mine to set timers and "navigate to X"

Depends on the phone. Bought a Pixel 3a to use after I lost my Pixel 2 in a car accident. The 3a picks up way less than the 2. But honestly, using my Google Home is super pleasant.

"Hey Google, turn on the lights"

"Hey Google, good night" -> reads me my agenda, asks me for an alarm time

Wake up, walk to the bathroom, "Hey Google, play the Economist podcast" while I brush my teeth. "Hey google, shuffle my thumbs up playlist" as I walk to the shower.

"Hey Google, set a timer for x seconds" while I'm cooking.

Fantastic tool.

This is interesting to me. As someone who works at Google, and is a huge Android fan (and Apple hater), I am constantly astounded at how bad Assistant seems to be for me, and how good Siri seems to be for my friends.

Maybe I just speak really unclearly? Unfortunately, basically all of my friends have iPhones (even at Google), so it's hard to know if it's just me.

Grass is always greener on the other side. If you used siri you would be confronted with the bad instead of only seeing the good (this goes for anything which you are not using)

As iPhone users, your friends probably have learned exactly what Siri is and is not capable of and only use it publicly for things they know Siri can handle. Privately, you’ve all seen how badly your phones’ assistants fail, but you’re only aware of the times Assistant has failed on you.

Very interesting. I can confirm the parent comment. I've got a kind of mumbling voice and am not a native English speaker, so Siri would not understand 60% of what I'm saying. While GA got everything I was saying every time, even when using a wired headset mic while riding a very noisy underground train.

I've got a Pixel 4 for work and an iPhone 8 for personal. (I work at Google now, but had a long stretch where I was trying to de-Googlify.) It's no comparison - Assistant seems way better than Siri. About the only advantage Siri has is in the personality department...she seems a bit nicer, while Assistant literally has the personality of a robot.

I'm a little surprised that Apple hasn't bought DuckDuckGo. Their privacy goals seem to mostly overlap and DuckDuckGo has really gotten good. Lately I've found them to be as good or better than Google for most technical or informational searches. The results are accurate and they seem to have less of a problem with bogus results from content scraping sites.

Google really does shine at location based searches though. If I'm looking for a physical place in any location or region, Google can be scary good (even when I misspell something).

A big part of what makes DDG great for me is that they are NOT owned by a mega corp.

Duck Duck Go is a reskin of Bing Search. It's not a real search engine in the 2020 meaning of the word.

Apple would be better off just using the Bing API too.

i've learned to use siri by knowing the select few commands it understands and memorizing the wording. modifying myself to conform to the tool.

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