> I can set my own alarms, thank you.
And not only that, but a specialized user interface is often preferable to voice even when the assistant passes the Turing test. There's a reason that people use apps to get food delivery rather than calling.
And not only that, but a specialized user interface is often preferable to voice even when the assistant passes the Turing test. There's a reason that people use apps to get food delivery rather than calling.
Your alarm example is frustrating. Of course, you could say "set alarm for tomorrow at 6:30 am" which would work, but then you're back in the realm not of natural language commands, but formal commands that exist in the uncanny valley, just similar enough to natural language to be irritating when they fail.
Edit: also, your "tomorrow at 6:30am" example is also open to interpretation if you're saying it two minutes after midnight. I'd really like it to recognize these sort of ambiguities and prompt me for clarification. "It's after midnight. By 'tomorrow at 6:30am', do you mean you want your alarm to go off about 6 hours from now or the next day?"
It doesn't even support 24 hour time - at least in English.
Again, whether I would understand them or not, no one to my knowledge speaks like that in U. S. English. It is a great example to use to show the quirks of language. It is a bad example to use to show that Siri "doesn't even support 24 hour time - at least in English".
And in any case i said eighteen not eight a m.
They use all kinds of languages with all kinds of accents and and ticks.
In my experience, and from the time I did a bit of NLP the situations is often along the line of. It works for mostly accent free simple English. Fails to get anywhere usable on most other languages and or accents. Sure that is to some degree because of missing training data. But for a consumer this doesn't change that for very many consumers this features work terrible bad.
Just out interest I tried out the youtube auto generated subtitle for a german video, but even at the parts where the text was super clear and well pronounced the result was hardly differentiable from randomly picking arbitrary words. It wasn't even that the algorithm choose similar sounding word. They where completely different words in many case. I think in a sentence of ~10 words in average 1 or 2 where correct. And that was at the parts where the text was unusually clear understandable. At other parts it wasn't even able to recognize that there where words...
Although it does have a problem with hours over 20 (“22 o’clock” becomes 20:02 for some reason, possibly because of my thick Italian accent).
Just imagine all the idioms they have to account for in these voice algorithms. I know in German they also handle "halb neun" correctly as 8:30.
Well, if I had some type of personal assistant who worked for me (as in, a real human), I would just call out "Hey, Sam, please order pizza for me" and continue with whatever I was doing.
The reason people don't make phone calls is they add a lot of additional friction. You have to dial the number, and wait for someone to pick up, and give them your address, and deal with frequently-questionable voice quality.
However, if you frequently order the same thing from a given restaurant, having a way to order "the usual" from that place via voice might be convenient. But I'm not sure it's much more convenient than being able to do the same thing with a button click or something.
For delivery, I agree. It is easier and faster to use a service, since my address and payment information are already saved.
For me, the ideal interface to engage (order something, create a note etc) when you know what you want is through speech. It just feels so effortless.
You can't get that with voice no matter how you do it. It's like if a restaurant had no menu and the wait staff just recited the menu in your face and asked you to pick. Even with real humans, voice isn't the best interface for presenting food choices.
That's exactly how food is presented to you at lots of high-end restaurants. Once you get above the fast-casual tier, menus never have pictures. If you know a lot about food and you trust the chef, voice is a perfect medium for explaining the choices. Pictures are just a discovery aid.