Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

On your searches:

1) I get the correct response; Assistant first asks me if I want to use "air check", I say yes, and get the correct response.

2) I get appropriate responses when I ask "What is the closest gas station to Mt. Shasta." Because the approaches are mostly from Rt. 5, you'll have no problem getting a usable response. Another approach from Rt 89 exists, so I don't know how you expect Google to know which "mountain pass" you mean. However, should you ask Google "What is the closest gas station to Mt Shasta on Rt 89", you will get an appropriate response. Should you be approaching from the opposite side of the mountain, unlikely though that is, Rt 5 or Rt 89 would still be the closest

3) I don't know why you expect a computer to answer this question well at all. I'm not aware of an API that would track this sort of thing. Google doing this itself, at scale, for any popular destination would be a very large project in ML with a very high error rate: Instagram photos are unlikely to be representative of a whole, the data set for a given location may be sparse, and especially for an outside location it is entirely likely (as I did at a local pumpkin farm) that people at an outside tourist destination will move away from a crowd, remove their mask, and take a nice photo safely, while people in close proximation still adhere to appropriate social distancing. Effective use would also need to be real-time: from day-to-day a given location could attract people that wear masks, and the next day a large group does not, especially in the > 300 square mile area you specified. It is not reasonable to expect this question to be meaningfully answered by either a human or a computer.

I don’t believe he’s looking for a voice assistant. He’s in the market for Lieutenant Data.

Rather, I think he's looking for the shipboard computer in Star Trek. Which is actually an excellent example of the untapped potential that voice-based computing holds.

The ship computer in Star Trek was always hilariously underpowered. They had to put an android on the bridge to operate manual controls during battle, for god’s sake.

It's also an excellent example of designing a user interface to look and sound cool on screen, rather than for usability, which is how I feel about most voice controls.

The operative word is assistant. Voice assistants should be able to do everything a human assistant can do.

the entire value of a (voice) assistant is that it can quickly and reliably deliver results. You don't need Data, but the system needs to be robust enough to work quickly. If you have to ask five times or spend minutes thinking about how to phrase the question, it's not assisting you in anything but wasting your time.

[Commander] Data

Presumably, at some point Data, who was a Lieutenant Commander at the outset of TNG, was a Lieutenant. (This may even be the case in one of the novels in which he features set prior to TNG.)

> 1) I get the correct response; Assistant first asks me if I want to use "air check", I say yes, and get the correct response.

Yeah, I don't. I just get "Sorry. I could not understand that." if I remember correctly.

> 3) I don't know why you expect a computer to answer this question well at all. [...] Instagram photos are unlikely to be representative of a whole

Sure, but I defined the query pretty clearly, and I just want to answer the "general" question of "Are people generally wearing masks in that area or not" and I already babysat that question into a data query that could use the Instagram API plus some object detectors.

I understand it's hard for one person to write code that could formulate and piece together that graph, but I feel like it should be a tractable engineering problem for Google.

This mindset is exactly why these assistants are bad. Start with the UX then work backwards from there and make it happen.

No. Asking a question in an unambiguous way is not a requirement that can be done away with. It can't be done in many normal text-based searches, it can't be done in face-to-face conversations with real people, so there should be no expectation that a voice search would yield any better results. Having actual data that exists to answer the question, as with the mask example, is also an essential requirement.

If you expect more, than your problem does not lie with voice assistants, it lies with search technology itself. "Expecting" these questions to be answerable is unrealistic given current capabilities. Working backwards from the UX would produce nothing better because your expectations are thwarted not by poor design, but by the limits of state of the art technology.

The three questions are completely answerable by a human. He might ask a bit more information though to answer correctly, which could also be expected of the device.

Rt. 5? Do you mean I-5? I'm curious if using "Rt." instead of "I-" is a regional thing. Where are you located? Typically Rt. would only be used for a small state road, not a major interstate highway.

It's a regional thing. In New England, we call Interstate 95 "Route 95", Interstate 93 is "Route 93", etc. US Route 20 that stretches from Boston to Oregon is "Route 20". And both the US Route 3 that goes north from Boston through New Hampshire, and MA Route 3 that goes south from Boston down to Cape Cod are called "Route 3".

> In New England, we call Interstate 95 "Route 95",

Actually, in the Boston area, it's "Route 128." Despite it never being indicated as such at exits or on maps.

The correct title for Californians is "The 5".

> The correct title for Californians is "The 5".

You have omitted the rather important qualifier “Southern” from your description, as that usage is a key differentiator between Northern and Southern California.

I live in the bay area and everyone I know calls it "I-5". "Everyone I know" of course could be biased though as most of my circle did not grow up in California.

I lived in Southern California (Orange County) in the 70s and 80s. We called I-5 the 5. Same for the 405, the 101, the 15, the 10, the 99. Also, we called State Route 1 (aka Highway 1) PCH no matter where it was located in the state, even though SR1 only has the Pacific Coast Highway designation between Oxnard and Dana Point.

I moved to Northern California (Santa Clara County) in the late 80s and I still use the same monikers. If I take a trip to Big Sur, I tell folks I am going to take the 17 to PCH and drive down. Old habits die hard.

https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/the-5-the-101-the-405-why...

“In Southern California, the definite article “the” gets placed before just about every freeway or highway, whereas in the Bay Area just the numbers are said.”

— https://www.kcbx.org/post/how-you-refer-us-101-says-lot-abou...

It's used interchangeably for the number of any road, at least in my experience. It certainly gave appropriate responses when I tested it out.

Where do you live? It sounds like this is a regional thing in the NE? I live in the PNW and in my 50 years I’ve never heard anyone use route in place of I-.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com