Artist releases album called “Ok Google Play Music” on Spotify
open.spotify.com
open.spotify.com
80% of the time my lights would turn on.
20% of the time, I’d be greeted with: “Ok, playing ‘Turn on the Lights’ by Future on Spotify.”
And I’d stand there in the dark, listening to music I don’t like, questioning my life decisions.
"I am not a number I am a free man!"
I've been meaning to have a play with https://mycroft.ai/ but only out of interest, I don't see myself leaving it running.
Now you can mispronounce it, that’s the only leeway we get.
Not a bad option. I would much prefer asking 19th century Russian author, Nikolai Gogol, to turn on the lights.
Also, I've mapped all of the functions we use to "recipes" that include the word "please" so that they don't work unless you use the word "please." i.e. the upstairs lights are named as for example "the Chicago lights" and there is a recipe that says "turn on the Chicago lights" when someone utters "Computer, please turn on the upstairs lights." So if you say "Computer, turn on the upstairs lights" it says "I don't know what upstairs lights are."
The disadvantage of this approach is that you need to get the string exactly as stored.
"#Karma.. Police.. Arrest this man, he talks in maths...#"
It sounded dumb enough for two adults to say it all day, but the convenience was worth it. Having my little one start using the phrase to talk to things is definitely where I draw the line.
Besides, now that it tries to make suggestions after every other command all you really hear in my house in regards to them is "hey google shut the fuck up and do what you're told". Unfortunately the stupid puck doesn't allow you to interrupt the unsolicited FAQ any longer.
Come to think of it, I think I'm getting rid of most of these things this weekend.
Of course Amazon isn't likely to ever do such a thing, because god forbid we don't have the ability to suddenly order something from Amazon on every device at all times.
Comically, that's actually one of the things its the worst at. I tried to do it exactly once and swore I would never do it again. In the time it takes to read the first search result, I could have found and ordered what I want from my phone. If that's what they were going for, I can't believe they didn't scrap the project.
Supposedly they're fairly good at re-ordering, but given how often Alexa mis-hears me, I'm not a fan of doing anything involving money on it.
There are, unfortunately, millions of ways we form relationships with brands. A brand's reason for existing is to live somewhere in our psyche either subconsciously or consciously. We say "Q-tip" instead of cotton swab, "band-aid" instead of bandage, "Advil" when we need ibuprofen, or "Tylenol" when we want acetaminophen. When we see white polar bears around Christmas time, we think of Coca-Cola, and so on and so forth.
All that to say, kudos for you for taking a principled approach, but I am not sure it's going to achieve much.
Last year my parents rented a room at a 5 star hotel. The hotel had a smart mirror and I only ever saw that mirror play ads. It's insane.
Google's Mid-2000s marketing and product-nomenclature was on-point though:
* Google Mail
* Google Maps
* Google Image Search
I refuse to use a service that requires me to say its globally recognized name so often I will probably become brainwashed to it. And then there's the older hacks with TV commercials that took advantage of those defaults, and the (cooler) hypersonic transmitted voice command attacks, or the ones delivered by vibrating the device's microphone with a laser, etc.
None of these attacks would have worked if the product trigger wasn't so predictable from the get-go.
Eventually even Raspberry Pi stopped using the default pi/raspberry default combination. How we invoke our voice-activated programs should be treated with equal care.
Or maybe not.
/s /h
That idea was canned...
https://www.techspot.com/news/46668-googles-answer-to-siri-m...
I think he didn't want to dilute the brand, and have the association front of mind or something, but the people on the alexa project managed to convince him to go with alexa instead (as it's confusing, and arguably a better name).
I think that's part of the reason for the different wake words, one of which is amazon (though the confusion with people called alexa is likely a much bigger one. It's probably why they have amazon in that list at least).
I can hear it now “We finally have a use for that brand we spent all that money on..”
True story.
It's isn't just branding though, if I'm right. The wake word needs to be something that is easy to pick out from a complex audio environment and not be a regular part of common speech so cause confusion (computer fails a bit in that regard) so allowing completely custom wake words might cause reliability issues. Also some might choose wake words that the brands don't want to be seen listening for: I might choose "slave" as a Blake's 7 reference for instance but that could easily offend some if they overhear, and there are many other epithets, slurs, and swears, that would not be deemed suitable either.
Though it can get a little confused occasionally when I'm playing some variety of Star Trek on the nearby TV.
I think Thom would approve.
It's honestly the reason for me.
Such a minor thing, and it's super annoying. Google lost out on hundreds of dollars from me on this simple change.
And the resulting announcements. "INFORMATION: Four minutes have elapsed." for a timer, etc.
I’d buy a big subwoofer to make the INFORMATION response shake the house too!
I don't see why the system could not be designed such that one could submit a wake-word, which is analyzed for suitability in terms of being sufficiently distinct in complex audio environments, and then checked against a blacklist.
Shouldn't be beyond Google's technical capabilities.
The thing is, a LOT of people avoid Google Home/Assistant because they simply can't bring themselves to blurt out cheesy branding like that.
They really ought to solve that problem. Probably they will right about the time they port Inbox bundling to Gmail and provide a Drive sync client for Linux (it's been, a decade?).
Unfortunately "enumerating the bad" is a strategy that never survives contact with the public.
They could also walk around saying offensive words when not addressing the computer.
Or is google planning on 'fixing' that too?
:)
Unfortunately some would reprogram other people's devices to cause offence for a jape and some will get offended and blame the company for letting it happen.
The difference from Google/Amazon/Apple/MS's point of view is that if I run around yelling the N word and their device doesn't even notice then they can't be seen to be complicit by unreasonable people. It would just be me being an arse.
Heck, some would get offended at the possibility of one of a company's devices responding to loaded words like that even if it never actually happened.
Of course there is another reason: having people use the same word re-enforces brand recognition even if the wake word is not the actual brand just a word/name people associate with it.
Say "McDonalds!" to end the commercial.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90185994/sony-files-patent-to-ma...
Because sure sounds like it is.
Man. Seems kinda relentless.
Submit a PR that responds to "Ok Google, enough!" by degoogling your life including automatically submitting your resignation.
"Oh, let me demonstrate this. Ok Google, turn off the lights."
"Ok Google, turn on the lights now."
"Ok Google, mute."
"Ok Google, turn on the lights."
"Ok Google, turn on the lights, damn it."
"Ok Google, turn, on, the, lights---there you go. I swear it works better yesterday."
Might as well just flip the switch myself, if I have to debate the assistant half of the time in total darkness.
"Alexa, ask phillips hue to turn on the living room light"
vs
clap clap
In Star Trek they were perfectly comfortable saying "Computer! Do the thing" in a more specific, 'computer' intonation. It was all fairly natural language, but there is no attempt to pretend the computer is a person. This made the thing feel more futuristic than what they're trying to do now.
I am flabbergasted that the following hasn’t been an option:
- hey Siri
- yes?
- what are the last three releases from <artist>?
- X Y and Z
- search again without EPs
- W X and Z
- Play the first one
- <playing W>
- thank you Siri
<conversation closed>
Also, with attention tracking that -already- exists with the FaceID array, the phone can know when it is addressed and when it’s not. You know, just like when you’re talking to someone, you usually look at them...
-- is Google misinterpreting your voice? E.g. does it hear a sound it thinks is "play" in the middle of your phrase?
-- or is it some weird statistical model that because of invisible and irrelevant correlations, sometimes concludes it's more likely you're asking for music? Like the song with that title is currently in the top 40, or was played by you in the past, or something?
(My brother in law is Australian living in the US, and has to use his "sarcastically fake American accent" to be understood on the phone. He, more politely than I, calls it his "phone voice". It's the same voice all my friends here use when parodying American stereotypes... I bet it works on Ok Google too.)
From a quick search, it looks like national accents are less of a problem, and the real difficulties like in dialects and foreign accents (e.g. a Spanish person speaking English).
But the idea that the training corpus used for speech recognition models is all "20-30 year old white male techbro bay area" guys is ludicrous. Where are you even getting this? Speech corpuses used for testing are put together by people who take demographic diversity seriously. On the other hand, they are sometimes biased towards a single mainstream national dialect. (E.g. "standard" American English, as opposed to a thick Boston accent.)
[1] https://voicebot.ai/2018/09/13/google-assistant-takes-lead-i...
I'm not entirely convinced Google test _anything_.
Certainly not convinced enough to not play it up in the context of a snarky dis on Google and Googler culture.
Don't you recall the infamous fifty-shades-of-blue thing with Google? Google's whole thing is that they quantitatively test everything.
Maybe you've been living under a rock the past 20 years? :P
Googler #1: "Marissa want to change the link colors _again!_ What can we do to make her stop micromanaging shit like this?"
Googler #2: "All we need to do is convince her we are obviously wrong about 'graphic design-y things' because we're developers, and that she can prove we are wrong by making a 'data driven' decision. Then we'll say 'The only way to prove we are wrong would be an insane global 0 way multivariate test of all possible colours!!!' and she'll _insist_ on it. Then we build a tool and run the test and point at the results every time she tries to make us change it again. And we can offer to run the tool for _everything else_ she micromanages us about in future too!"
Googler #1: "Brilliant! So, do we build the tool and run the test? Or just make up the results and present them to her?"
Can confirm, in high school I had to occasionally go AFK after being beckoned talk to the amazon echo because it wouldn't understand my parents' accents.
A lot of immigrant children get used to translating for their parents, but repeating commands but with a native accent is a newer phenomenon.
Used to be the same in the store, tuna sandwich pls. Huh? What? Oh, toona!
Settings > Siri > Language > English (United Kingdom)
Settings > Siri > Siri Voice > British
Apple advertises:
> Since Siri is designed to recognize accents and dialects of the supported countries or regions, Siri’s accuracy rate will be highest for native speakers.
Or is this problem just with American friends' devices?
My Siri's set to American but when I travel to London local maps and stuff all works fine there?
I have a convenient, quiet, perfectly reliable single-bit computer on the wall in every room in my house. It costs $1, can be operated by a 2 year old, is perfectly intuitive, and the only downside I can think of is that occasionally it necessitates I be very slightly less lazy than I might otherwise be able to aspire to, i.e. when I need to go downstairs and turn off a forgotten light.
Considering my house is all using LED lights on hydro power, it's probably better for me to just leave a 5w light on all night than it is to install a Google Home setup here, in terms of my carbon footprint.
That is the key point, for me anyway. "Computer, all lights off" instead of getting out of bed when I've left something on is one of my lazy wins from voice control. Setting multiple timers without touching things with messy hands while faffing in the kitchen is another.
Hey Pal! for Edinburgh
Hey Jimmy! for Glasgow
Yo! for LA
Oi! for NY
Doode for SF
etc
Previously, I could say "Play my Thumbs Up" and it could do so on Google Play Music.
It keeps playing a song called "My Likes". Jesus fucking Christ, Google. If I say "Play my My Likes playlist" something random happens.
Do these guys even use their product? I'm just glad this album didn't come out before the forced migration.
EDIT: Okay, I went to verify it and this has to be the best instance of massive PEBKAC plus some UX donkeyness. The auto playlist is called "Your Likes" so I can get the Assistant to do the right thing by telling her to play her likes (Ok Google, play your likes). What the fuck man. But fine. At least I got it working.
I've suffered with this for months and now I find a solution in the few minutes after posting this.
Even Gmail, can’t trust that it won’t be deprecated in the future.
Leaving YouTube is nigh impossible.
any examples?
Music-wise, I have completely transitioned to Alexa and Amazon Music. The interface is worse, but they seem to be more stable.
I just wish I could upload my own music and have Alexa connect to Bandcamp.
In classic Internet tradition, you basically need to setup a shadow Google account where you lie about their age and add them to your family account anyway. Thanks Google!
The "solution" is to cast the tab. Which means lower bitrate, no music controls, and if you cast to a display device, the whole tab screencasts etc.
I guess it's because nobody important uses the web anymore? Or something?
(Disclaimer: I work at Google. But not on YTM. Most Googlers I know have switched to Spotify, including myself.)
Ask for War Pigs? Here’s the live version
Ask for a Come Sail Away? Here’s a terrible cover
Ask for Magic Stick? Here’s an instrumental
I swear it just picks the version of the song that pays the least royalties and plays that instead of the right one...
This is a very interesting theory, I don't know if this was revealed somehow but considering how consistently terrible the guesses are on assistant devices... I wouldn't be surprised.
I think the far more likely explanation is just that these home assistant products suck.
Assuming the voice recognition part worked perfectly:
1) query song database for input 2) play result that is most popular (most plays by manual selection in eg desktop client etc)
The only tricky part is to determine whether the query is an artist or a title but again in most cases this will be solved by checking popularity.
What's a plausible explanation that they mess this up so badly?
I am sure they're working on improving it. We've not yet reached late stage capitalism with voice assistants.
Karaoke time! You can do this.
The answer to any technical problem will present itself within 30 seconds (sometimes minutes) of asking "Hey, can you take a look at this?"
Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
The concept is named after Ward Cunningham, father of the wiki. According to Steven McGeady, the law's author, Wikipedia may be the most well-known demonstration of this law.
Cunningham's Law can be considered the Internet equivalent of the French saying "prêcher le faux pour savoir le vrai" (preach the falsehood to know the truth). Sherlock Holmes has been known to use the principle at times (for example, in The Sign of the Four.)
Or put differently, you are completely wrong about Sherlock using it in Sign of the Four. Prove me wrong! ;)
"If, instead, you say 'Linux sucks, you can't even get a f*&$ing WiFi driver working!' thousands of people will solve the problem for you."
Whether unintentional or not, it has put a huge smile on my face.
If you say "OK Google play my likes on youtube music" it will play `Your likes`.
If you forget the `on youtube music` part even if your default player is set to Youtube music it will play the `my likes` song.
And on mobile GPM had a very simple functionality: a playlist containing all the songs you've downloaded offline. To the best of my knowledge YTM has no such thing, just a playlist _it makes for you_ of offline songs.
Also, the shuffle button only shuffles the current songs in queue, not the playlist your currently listening too like Spotify and GP Music do.
They couldn't move it to my main because it was legacy, but that was where I had youtube premium/red whatever. So then I needed to switch between accounts. Not fun while you are driving.
Oh then they stopped premium so I started hearing ads. Not what I want when I'm trying to calm my screaming kid in the car. Oh, and I need to keep my phone screen on.
Many of the songs aren't the same as on Google play.
Google seems to be moving toward search/email/YouTube. With few other products. Probably good, they can't handle it.
Inferior is much better than "we'll delete your music library on an undisclosed date in December".
Maybe not Apple because their fanatics will apologize for any wrong doing.
When they forced the transition to YouTube music, I gave up the service for good.
Meanwhile, here in Siri Land...
Me: Hey, Siri, add "tomatoes" to my Groceries list.
Siri: OK, Reapreducer. Which list should I add it to?
Me: Groceries.
Siri: OK, Reapreducer. Which list should I add it to?
Me: Groceries.
Siri: OK, Reapreducer. Which list should I add it to?
Me: Groceries.
Siri: OK, Reapreducer. Which list should I add it to?
Me: Groceries.
Siri: OK, Reapreducer. Which list should I add it to?
Me: Cancel.
I've gone back to paper grocery lists. They Just Work™.
I see that I still have no reason to bother, it's going to frustrate me more than anything else (especially with how downhill voiceover has gone in 12).
The latter point is a bit broader: now that Siri can hit an arbitrary URL via shortcuts, you can really just set your own trigger phrase to do anything that can be automated. You better believe I have a raspberry pi on order which will be running a local webserver...
Point is, YMMV; just try it for yourself.
I take a photo with my phone. It's not perfect because to mark things off you'd have to use the photo-editing on the phone which would be rather clunky for that purpose. But it works if you don't mind checking things off in your head.
> How do you keep it from getting erased?
I've got a glass whiteboard and use liquid chalk markers. It's tough to accidentally erase something with those.
> Hey Siri, set a timer for 8 minutes.
> Ok. 8 minutes and counting.
I can't speak for the chef, but it does on HomePod. Each gets its own name and that name is announced when the alarm goes off.
"bleep bloop bleepity boop! Eggs timer. bleep bloop bleepity boop!
I only figured out through trial and error that I can name my Alexa timers without waiting for it to prompt me:
> Alexa, set a pasta timer for 10 minutes
> - Pasta timer, 10 minutes, starting now.
> Alexa, cancel pasta timer
> - Pasta timer canceledIt has for at least the past couple years now.
Hey Siri, set a timer for 5 minutes. "OK."
Hey Siri, set another timer for 10 minutes. "A timer is already running, do you want to replace it?"
If you miss hearing the distinction in the confirmation, you'll miss the scheduled event
Edit: They also have distinct classification of alarm/timers. You can use either word to create one but checking what you've set or trying to cancel will result in 'no timers/alarms' set if your request doesn't match their system design.
> Hey Siri, set a timer for 13 minutes
> 30 minutes and counting.
> Hey Siri, set a timer for thirteen minutes.
> oh you already have a timer running, do you want me to change it?
> yes
Also I have set timers and lock the phone ‘too early’ and the timer was lost
I do have to specify "Living Room TV", even though the speaker and chromecast are configured to be in the same room, it still just turns off a bedroom tv if I'm not specific about which tv.
Also "Hey Google, turn off the Xbox" works, because I linked that at some point.
So not just timers! ;)
The thing I use Siri most for is "Hey, Siri. Tell me a joke."
My dream job is to work at Apple compiling jokes for Siri to belch out on demand.
It used to do a cheesy "Starting your timer.... Now", which would have been okay if a bit tedious repeatedly, apart from the fact that actually you could see that the timer started immediately, so the whole delayed "now" thing was completely misleading. It was like that for well over a year until I noticed it was fixed just recently.
Also Siri is constantly having problems knowing if I’m talking to my watch or my iPhone, even if my phone is in my pocket.
Perhaps it was just being passive-aggressive?
Funnily enough, this is one issue I don’t have: between my phone, watch and iPad I’m consistently impressed at how well it manages to choose the best one - does anyone know if Apple devices actively co-ordinate which one responds to Siri commands?
I say, “Add blood pressure <pause> 120 over 80 plus 60.” Then I use the shortcut to parse the string on the / and +, and record it to Health.
The hard part was finding delimiters that Siri would consistently record as a single character. That and realizing I needed a manual review step to make sure Siri didn’t happily pump garbage into my logs.
I don't use any of these "assistants", but curious if you responded with "Groceries List"? Knowing they work on keywords, to Siri, you may not be actually answering her question.
That said Siri feels at least 100 times smarter than Google assistant to me, the below are actual (if somewhat anonymized) examples:
- Google suggestions when I look at the phone at 5am in the morning: "text random friend of a friend that I answered a question for over Telegram" or "call customers project manager". See https://erik.itland.no/tag:aifails for screenshots and more examples. In the years I had access to the future it maybe helped me twice by pointing out it was time to leave for an appointment.
- Siri suggestions are mostly mundane (more or less predictably tells me when to leave for appointments, kids soccer and hockey training etc, suggests picking up kids at kindergarden - although not consistently, suggests sending messages to my wife over our preferred messaging solution, tweeting, or if I drive 5 minutes down to the shopping center: that I should drive home the way I always do etc) but I have never caught it suggesting outright idiotic things like Google, and once this weekend it even suggested something semi-smart (a text message to my wife that was surprisingly close to one I could have written myself to tell her I was on my way home, including one of my rather unusual abbreviations and with good timing :-)
TomTom had this solved eons ago - my TomTom 5000 from 2014 automatically sets destination as work when I get in the car in the morning, and home when I'm done with work. And it learns my schedule per day, so it doesn't do that on the weekends, or if I need to pop out somewhere at lunch. Such a simple feature from 6 years ago works better than anything that Google can seemingly come up with.
Almost 30 years later, how many orders of magnitude faster silicon and countless person-hours of research and I can't get my damn phone (which, yes, _is_ a marvel that way-back-when-me wouldn't believe) to recognize, "call mrs_mynameisash" when I'm using my hands-free while driving. I don't know how many times Google's voice assistant has called some (possibly local?) T-Mobile instead. And my wife's name sounds nothing like "T-Mobile".
I remember, when I was a wee little lad back in '96, playing on an old Mac Plus with a black and white screen. Even then we had software installed that would let us control the old Mac Plus with our voice. It was the first time I'd ever used a boom microphone.
Here, go reminisce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlainTalk
My dad insisted that a boom microphone was required -- not just any microphone but a "boom" microphone specifically. It was interesting when I showed him some smaller microphones years later that worked better with less noise.
Oh man have I grown since. Hardware and processing power have both grown so much. But speech recognition is still as dumb (or even dumber) as it was 30 years ago. It certainly didn't need the internet to work back then!
„Thank you... delete thank you“
Also fun - you say something, the words you said show up on the screen, and then change into completely different words.
Yep. When it works, I get entries for both "ginger" and "ale."
Me: Ok, Google. Remind me to leave at 1 O'Clock.
Google: Ok. Do you want to save this? <shows preview of reminder, dings to indicate it's listening>
Me: Yes.
Google: Shows Google search results for "yes" and tosses the reminder.
Voice Recognition Elevator - ELEVEN!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNuFcIRlwdc
First aired in 2009
Siri: I couldn’t find a shopping list, do you want me to create one?
Me: no. Hey Siri, add tomatoes and grap-
Siri: you have to select which app you want to continue <shows 6 apps, including Paprika. I tap Paprika> Sorry, Paprika has not implemented this function yet.
Me: Hey Siri, addtomatoesandgrapestotheshoppinglistinPaprika
Siri: ok, I’ve added “tomatoesandgrapes” to the shopping list in Paprika 3
<phone flies out of the window>
It's always frustrating but never particularly hard to find the special incantation that will invoke it to do the thing that you want it to. Overall though it's simply not worth the effort which is probably why I end up using these overwhelmingly complex devices only for their most mundane functions like timers and getting the weather.
Trying for anything moderately complex, and I might as well be asking the dog to do it for me.
For example I have Philips Hue lights behind the TV/Screen on my living room wall, and I use their "color loop" behind the screen when watching movies etc. The problem is that "TV", "Television" and "Screen" are semi-protected words, so "turn off tv lights" ends up with the TV being turned off 9/10 times. "We" compromised and those lights are now called "screen wall" lights
As for setting certain lights to "the color loop", what used to be a 90% success rate (the other 10% turning my lights to "the color blue/bloo(p)") will now set the lights of the room I'm currently in to the color loop, which is usually the living room, not the screen wall. Also as recently as this summer I used to be able to set the whole house to "the color loop" this feature recently disappeared. The color loop slowly and nearly imperceptibly fades the colors from red to green to blue etc over several minutes. It's technically part of "hue labs" but it's a "beta feature" that's been available in the product now for over three years so I would argue it is core functionality at this point.
At least there are no tribbles.
Because coffee is for closers.
But I already have a grocery list and a process for it. I just want a reminder to add something to it.
"Hey Siri, set a reminder <for {date/time|location}>."
> "Okay, what do you want me to remind you?"
"Put dingus on the grocery list"
> Done.
I used to be able to ask Siri: "Hey Siri, please set the lights to green." Then she would obediently set all of the lights to green. Nice, that's my favorite!
Then a few months ago some update was pushed (iOS? Apple Home app? Philips Hue app? Philips Hue Basestation OS? No idea) and now that exact phrase (which has worked for two years) suddenly elicits a response: "OK, which room?" -- followed by a listing of the rooms in which I have devices and a catch-all "Everywhere".
So now I've had to change my incantation: "Hey Siri, please set all of my lights to green."
I'm just waiting for her to start asking "Do you want Lime Green, Aqua Green, or Vomit Green?". Or worse, maybe she'll just give up and say "OK, here's a list of Google results for Green Lights." Maybe even throw a captcha in there asking me to select the green lights at intersections, just for good measure.
/s
Actually, I set my living room to red because that's my favorite. And I set my dining room to blue because eating is cool. And when you gotta go then just look for the green light in the hallway in front of the bathroom. And my office is definitely purple in the morning to show just how much I want to punch things because I have to work. It's pink in the afternoon because pink noise from the freeway shouldn't be limited to sounds.
At night I set all the lights to 15%. With the colors it's dark enough to not be blinded when I want some water from the kitchen but also bright enough to see the contours of the door knob or kitchen table or dining chair so I don't stab myself with any of the corners while walking blind.
What colors do you set your lights to?
I have some colored lights from Eria that have about as good color spectrum and integrate with Zigbee base stations. They were about 1/2 the price of Philips Hue. But the downside is that they don't integrate with Apple Home. Apple Home (and Siri) only recognizes the expensive Philips Hue lights even though the Eria ones are connected to the same Philips Hue base station. So with the Eria lights I just change the colors manually with a third party app on my phone.
And as a bonus as a developer: Philips Hue has an API to work with the devices connected to the base station. It's super fun to tell coworkers about a script that sets my lights in the office (and visible in video meetings) to red because the server in the living room is having trouble. ;)
For more generic lighting, there's a reverse engineered firmware you can load onto a ZigBee. I used them to create some wake-up therapy lights: http://edwardsh.in/2019/07/22/hue-compatible-therapy-lights
> [...] this device will be free from defects in material and workmanship and will operate for 2 years and 3 years for Energy Star certified products, unless a different period is stated in or on the packaging of the product, based on up to 3 hours average working time per day/7 days per week, when used as directed
I don't really know anyone who only uses lights three hours a day, especially when it gets dark pretty early during winter.
[0] https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us/support/legal/warranty
For working during the day, my office lamp is "banana mania". For dinner time, the dining room lights are "topaz".
You can also set a light to a color manually, then ask Siri what color it is. (This is how I discovered "banana mania" which is Siri's name for the color Hue calls "concentrate".
Never even thought of this. That's modern day software discoverability for you
I have an iPad with iOS12, and when I say “turn off the lights”, all the lights turn off.
I also have an iPhone with iOS14, and when I say “turn off the lights”, she asks where. Super annoying.
“Hey google, dinner time “ - shut all lights but the kitchen and start a playlist.
“Hey google, tv time” - set all lights to specific colours and turn off any music.
not always. I used to use google play music to play music from my own library in the car. any time I asked it to play a moderately obscure artist, it would interpret that as whatever popular artist had a similar name. it would then play the radio station for that artist, since I didn't have the premium subscription. I found some success with spelling out the artist name letter by letter, but even that consistently failed for certain names.
also sometimes I would say "list albums by X" to help me remember the name of what I wanted. no matter what I tried, it would only list three albums "and others". who could want this behavior? if I ask you to list albums, yes I actually want to hear every single album name!
I'm now paying for YT music (since the free version apparently does not support android auto), and it so far it works flawlessly. infuriating.
If these things would actually work, I'd definitely use one regularily. However, whenever I visit an Alexa owner, I realize after a few interactions that I really couldn't be bothered with this stuff.
I think the "taxi" problem is still around with Siri. Put any taxi organisation into your phonebook, and include "taxi" in the name. You will likely not be able to call it with siri, since it insists to search for taxis in your area. Its always the same bug. These things have absolutely no idea about the context. And some hand-crafted rules go haywire after a while, because apparently nobody reviews them. When I got my first iPhone (iOS 5) I put in my date of birth during configuration, and promptly noticed that the german speech synthesizers says Nineteenseventynine when I enter 1979. All aother 4-digit numbers are fine, only 1979 is pronounced english. So apparently someone put this exception in there for a completely bogus reason, and it stayed there. It is still there today, after 8 years.
Because they’re currently better than nothing. My HomePod works 90% of the time. I can create specific scenes for the things she can’t quite figure out.
Being able to walk in to the kitchen and tell her to put the radio or the light or a specific album or a timer on is actually really amazing. Most of the time. Certainly amazing enough to suffer the times she doesn’t want to co-operate, because then I just do that myself which I would have done anyway.
It helps that the HomePod is also a great speaker in its own right, and that it’s one single cylinder with one cord. It’s a very tidy device.
The only use case I see which has an acceptable failure rate is asking for the time and setting a timer. And even asking for the time fails about 1/10 times with the Alexa system my gf has in her flat...
And if asking for the time is the only thing which works decently, well, that is really telling about the state of the art...
Why not?
Why not?!
Similar story for self-driving cars: car driving helpers/assistants (lane keeping, etc.) are ok, self-driving cars will be a huge disaster until we are really close to AGI.
These are the things where getting 80-90% there isn't enough. We're smarter than chimps or other animals because we can cover the long tail of events.
I think magical incantations is a perfect way to think about it. Using voice assistants feels more like the land of Harry Potter than the land of technology we live in. It's the flipside of “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
My tolerance for mistakes for simple commands that work sometimes / are the right command ... but don't work is ultra low.
Like how is it my Android phone will default to just googling "exact valid voice command letter for letter" (it's used in a commercial for cripes sake!) ... and not somehow notice that?
I start using it. I have two or three commands I do regularly.
One of the commands stops working. I stop using it forever.
I watch a lot of YouTube on my phone when cooking, I even built a cardboard stand for my phone for this reason. What I want is for YT to respond to these voice commands:
- Pause video.
- Play video.
- Rewind 10 seconds.
- Skip the (expletive) ad <-- ok, I can understand why this one might not work.
Sadly, this doesn't work. And it's the only voice assistance I really need :(
Was also curious about your use cases on the phone (aside from ad skip), and they actually worked for me. I'm using a pixel 4, though wouldn't think that'd make a difference.
OK Google, install Newpipe.apk
Similarly, they say English language Search is powered by Transformers. But when I want to perform searches it often switches the intent to something wrong. It's a blunt tool, not a precision instrument.
1. I have my phone set up to trust bluetooth in my car and unlock my phone. I get in the car and say "okay google, open spotify" -- this is so that it will continue playing what I was listening to before I left work.
"Okay", she says, and then tells me that she can't do that because my screen is locked. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it does not.
2. When I had Google Play Music it reliably would play random sub-par covers of songs rather than the original, even when I specified the artist.
3. Sometimes it decides to rely on screen input instead of audio controls. I can't do that while I'm driving.
4. It sometimes ends voice input too early or does voice input inconsistently. I've sent messages to my wife saying "I'm on my way home exclamation point" instead of "I'm on my way home!"
5. Commands which have worked for months suddenly stop working.
6. Sometimes my screen stays on, forever, after asking to play music. (OnePlus 7T, Android 10). This does not always happen.
7. Google: "Here's your message, send it?" Me: Yes Google: Sits there for a moment and pops up the results for "Yes" in the assistant.
My biggest gripe isn't what it can and can not do. It is the inconsistency that drives me up the wall. I am not a heavy user and most of my requests are because I wish for it to be hands-free in a car with bluetooth audio. I'm sure that this is a harder problem to solve than just me interacting with the phone, but it is a common use case.
Or, possibly different tires.
This is an unusual problem - sounds annoying in general!
This is my biggest gripe. Whatever magic voodoo ML they use is inconsistent, and it's not clear what level of abstraction this inconsistency is happening in.
What I want is the reliability of Google Assistant's speech to text parsing, combined with a firm, customizable interface. Something like If This Then That, where there are some default commands with a clear reliable command pattern: "send message to George Orwell, we live in your book", and commands can be added.
I use Android these days, but have stopped even attempting to use voice control when driving for all the reasons you've mentioned. It does almost feel like the functionality has gone backwards in recent years.
Part of the disconnect here is likely how I am understanding "Trusted Bluetooth Device". I likely have to unlock it once while paired with that BT device, while the text says "$DEVICE_NAME unlocks this device when nearby".
This isn't great.
I get the impression that many Google employees do not use the products they work on.
Relatedly, I wonder if these assistants “filter bubble” you like search does. Like, learning what types of things you are looking for and grouping you with other similar people.
The thing is predictability, though, and maybe handling the common use cases. It gets frustrating when they get worse. Kids, on the other hand, only get better at understanding you (though perhaps also better at frustrating you on purpose).
To put it simply, I'm happy to make myself perform incantations. I'll say "Ok Google, grooblepuff the bonkman" to get the thing to do the thing. This whole thing has made me understand why wizards and sorcerers chant Accio! and Sectumsempra! and shit like that because if they just said "Bring me my firebolt" no one knows how the AI that runs magic in the world would interpret that.
And you know someone who feels this strongly about the product is pretty bought into it. Like, if I didn't use it so much, I wouldn't be complaining this much.
But the way I see it is that any Google Assistant PM is going to see this for what it is: someone who is angry because they love not because they hate.
This is a question that I too ask myself daily with a lot of the software that I deal with and depend on.
Now only Google can hear my every word via cellphone and Nest.
And look how incompetent Google is. I don't even get creepy suggestions on ads since I deleted facebook.
I have to re-do it with "Ok Google, text Mary 'I'll be home in 10'", and growl a lot on the inside.
Wonder if these AI assistants will lead to the development of a new language.
Exterminatum Horix Abracadabra (Siri, play something nice).
That said, I end up frustrated with Alexa more often than satisfied.
What we need are people building interfaces for themselves, not people building interface they think are good for others.
Unfortunately, there was a tour going through the lab at the time. Some VPs from some company got to watch me honk the horn and then bang my head against the desk.
In the last 16 years, the state of the art has not advanced, as far as recognizing my speech goes. It still don't work.
I'm astonished at how badly it works compared to Alexa, but sadly, Alexa no longer supports alarms via BBC Sounds, so it's not an option for me.
When Bart, Lisa , Maggie and Marge were at the Mt. Useful Visitors Center, Bart went to a statue of Smokey the Bear. Smokey said "Only WHO can prevent forest fires ?" Bart then pressed the You button and Smokey said "You pressed you, referring to me, that is incorrect. The correct answer is you."
This used to really irritate me. Microsoft called folders things like “my pictures”. The awkward personalisation seemed so gross (I used a Mac). However Spotify’s “Your likes” is even worse, it sounds more like big brother giving me temporary access. I’m not sure how I ended up fixating on this.
With natural language and speech interfaces, we face such long tail problems too .. like the Burger King ad triggering a whopper lookup via "ok google".[1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/business/burger-king-tv-a...
* "never play that song ever again"
* "add <artist> to my blocked list"
* "set the plays limit for Baby Shark to once per day"
* a feature that prevents interpretation of any phrase leading to the same result, if the response to that result led to a "stop!" or "for fuck's sake!" within the next ten seconds. i.e. stop doing the same incorrect thing over and over again if it's clear that it's not the desired outcome.
* "play that song I said I liked a few days ago"
* "shuffle my favourite songs"
We don't want you to get the song wrong and be forced to yell "stop!" until you shut up. We want to make it clear that not only was that the wrong song, we also never want you to ever think it could possibly be the right song.
We want the magic of our kids being able to play their music on demand, but without the headaches that come from kids being total assholes most of the time.
We want you - our voice assistant - to assist us, not provoke us to rage.
You've made a useful tool. You've made a fun gimmick. But now it's time to make it a pleasant experience, because right now it just plain isn't.
That said, I've refrained from using my google puck in recent months and it had been regressing pretty heavily when I did, so I can't guarantee that still works.
- stop giving me suggestions. Alternatively, don't give me the same suggestion again within a month of the last time you have it to me. - you've got the weather, that's great. Now stop repeating the same unwanted information (the current weather) when I ask for multiple forecasts (what's the weather for tomorrow and Saturday -> the weather tomorrow is... Currently it is... There is a weekend advisory in effect...The weather Saturday is... Currently it is... There is a wind advisory...) - let me specify what information I want when I ask for the weather; it should be trivial to get the wind speed, UV index, it whatever other item I want every time I ask for current weather or forecast, not just if it's going to be unusual.
Why didn't Google ever change it?!
It doesn't have repeated vowel sounds unless you pronounce it something like "OK Go-Goal"
It has, in order, one "o", one "u", and one "ə".
How is that much different from "Hey Google", both are 3 syllable. Alexa is too though I agree just saying the name flows better.
So being forced to say ”OK Google" is actually a regression from previous capability.
https://www.droid-life.com/2014/12/04/moto-x-tip-use-a-whist...
[0]https://www.discogs.com/MarcoV-Cdelmp3-Solarize/release/1334...
"eps1.9_zer0-day.avi"
"shutdown -r"
"404 Not Found"
Edit: lol, I didn't know that we could format text with asterisks on HN. There should be an asterisk before each ".mp3", but as you can see, if I put them in it just italicizes the text in between them.
C:\ del *.mp3
del C:\ *.mp3
My favorite misfeature is babbling. Used to be you could just say “off” to stop a misinterpreted command, which worked fine because the assistant didn’t used to babble. Now though, its own rambling follow-ups interfere with its ability to even hear you desperately saying “no! off! stop! shut up! cancel!”. And my new favorite, every command response ending with an unsolicited “BY THE WAY: $thing_i_did_not_ask_for”.
Google starts reading me the Wikipedia page for Glass Animals.
the next step for it to go really viral would be to make the album consist only of various generic voices saying "ok google play ok google play music".
https://youtube.com/watch?v=u_kQJiogKCE
It's South Park, so the nsfw should be implied.
Minutes into the episode Twitter was full of people posting about how it was messing with everyone's smart speakers. Tech comedy gold.
This creates even more combinations and even more shenanigans.
https://open.spotify.com/artist/6X9HMvCAb5RiZhcwekJLNY
"Hey Alexa Play Music" and "Hey Siri Play Music" with tracks like "OK Alexa Play Lofi".
I don't imagine it's likely to have the effect of confusing anyone's smart speaker, is it?
I had to say “Ok Google play okay Google play music”
So, I asked Siri the above prompt. Siri took me to Apple Music and played an album with the name "Coloring Book" but by a different artist.
First, Spotify has no idea how to pipe its playlists to Alexa and Google ... so you can't ever seem to get either to play playlists.
Second, Spotify randomly decides sometimes that it won't connect to the Internet, even when your phone has a 4G connection and everything else works fine. To compound the issue, Spotify doesn't know how to show you your offline downloads when you are in Android Auto mode ... so you basically can't even play your songs when on a drive.
I need to figure out how to export my playlists and then I'm off Spotify forever. Worse customer experience ever.
What is wrong here ?
Damn, that's kinda lame. I was hoping it was tracks of phrases starting "OK Google" to make your Google Home flip out and do weird shit.
Wasted opportunity.
Ingenious if it actually works.
?si=1Y4i7boAQc-jCc2IP_BGSw&utm_source=podnews.net&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=podnews.net:2020-12-02)
Here’s the url with the tracking parameters removed:
And every track ends with vocals saying "this was drumkoon."
I'd much rather just have the ability to set trigger words that execute macros. Really, there are only a few of them that i need regularly.
It's amusing to think that there is an elegant solution to this problem in text --- quoting --- which unfortunately a lot of the population doesn't understand beyond one level at most, but also cannot easily be expressed verbally.
The below link is not working. Please check
Artist releases album called “Ok Google Play Music” on Spotify https://bit.ly/36xDd8h
Artist releases album called “Ok Google Play Music” on Spotify https://bit.ly/36xDd8h
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Please check
Is it actually representative of the genre it is supposed to be in, or is it a put on like some industrial noise?
Cartman and Alexa - https://youtu.be/ESt7CTZiXqY?t=123
If I say that command, surely this isn’t now going to play, or is it?
I had an amazing indie music discovery service in Google Play Music. I found so many fantastic underplayed artists, and it helped me explore all the small music venues in my city. I've got a wall full of signed albums from artists I discovered with Google Play Music.
YouTube music recommends Britney Spears. It's so awfully wrong about my tastes.
It also randomly inserts YouTube parody videos into my playlist. Why the hell would I want to listen to stuff like this https://youtu.be/-5jWtz3rzco ?
I hate Google so much now. They're like evil 90's Microsoft, but incompetent. They've got their ad monopoly / web destruction engine to sustain them, but they're Dilbert Pointy Haired Boss bad with everything else.
No gamers will be surprised when Stadia gets canned.
It'll be hilarious when they decide to shutter GCP. Remember when it leaked that they were internally threatening to defund it if they couldn't hit growth targets? Imagine all their B2B relationships getting hit as hard as their consumers do.
Just dislike these songs/videos. At first all I did was play playlists I already had in YT since the 'my mix' (now "my supermix") playlist had random songs I listened to 5 years ago, but after about a week of using the 'my mix' and disliking songs, I started getting a bunch of great songs from artists that I otherwise had no idea about.
Right now I'm pissed that Google tv doesn't have a working account switcher. If my wife watches music videos it retrains my YouTube music.
Also, youtube music sucks when it comes to spotty connections and file management. I have fiber at work and home, unmetered 4g, and 100gig free space on my phone. Why doesn't it just download everything? I loose service for hours on end and I come to find that it has either not saved any songs or it has deleted everything it can. Today I started an album and then hit a dead spot, and it had deleted all the songs before the track I was on, and not qeued up the rest of the album. Google music had a setting where you could tell it to allocate gigs of space and keep it full. This push to simplify user experiences is why I avoid apple, and I hate seeing it creep into google.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/11/30/google-tv-is-perfec...
I'm about to go full self-hosted on a ton of stuff. Plex, Book Sonic, Next Cloud, etc. Then I can move when I want to move.
Edit: I actually bought a used (came from Google I believe) Dell R620 on ebay, loaded to the hilt (dual 8 core (16 total physical cores) E5-2650, 256 GB RAM, 10 600GB drives (SAS)). They're amazingly affordable. I paid around $750 with shipping. I can run a hell of a lot of stuff on that and since I'm mostly at home these days it will be blazing fast (way better than existing cloud stuff that is limited by my 20Mbps downlink, which is the fastest I can get). Nothing like a Gigabit connection to my "cloud" :-D
I try to buy all my audio books from Downpour since they are DRM free, and music as you mentioned isn't a problem. I was very into music in the 90s/00s and bought nearly every CD I wanted and I ripped them into mp3s years ago. I may just budget a $100 or so to buy mp3s I don't have that I still want to listen to, and cancel YT music.
I don't often buy ebooks since I love physical paper, but when I do I try to buy DRM free or use Calibre/Apprentice Alf to strip the DRM and convert to epub.
Movies are a real challenge though. Plenty of older stuff I have on DVD and it's easy to rip, but it does take an enormous amount of effort to rip blu-ray. I may try to do an OTA antenna hooked into Plex for most of TV, but will probably keep CBS all access and a couple others for movies/shows/etc. So I'll self host most things :-D
I also get songs I've already thumbs downed reappearing repeatedly. It's bizarre how bad it is in some respects, while still being decent in others. (They're not even new top hits being aggressively promoted. It's mostly 80s rock they'll toss in no matter how many times I say I "no, I don't like this song".)
Google provides a gateway to the internet for most of us. They control what we find in most cases , but it's almost as if they have tons of money to spend elsewhere but lack any direction on how to do so.
Overall I’m very happy with Spotify but experience has shown that within a few years it’ll begin the slow and unstoppable turn towards Villainy.
Also, Spotify doesn't upload your music for streaming, its just a sync between your phone and computer that have to be on the same wifi, and keeps the songs downloaded on your phone. Wouldn't work for a collection bigger than your phones storage. I wouldn't even compare this to GPM.
Its as if they threw that all progress out with YT Music.
I'm willing to give the service a few months to clean up major bugs and such and see how it is then, but I'm still looking for alternatives
It's like people lamenting how sad it is that Windows mobile failed. Well, why would you want Microsoft to dominate both desktop and mobile market? Seems like a scary scenario.
In this perspective, I can appreciate how clueless Google can be sometimes. It's not a bug, it's a feature! ;)
At the end of the day music isn't critical to me, so I don't really care if Google dominates it. If I had to switch I'm not too worried about being locked into something.
Everything else are hobby side projects.
Like the rich dude who can self finance that metal album he always wanted to record.
It had some nice features too, but I decided to quit. Now I'm just listening to my collection of mp3s but not super happy.
Totally agree on the playlists too. I recently liked a video on youtube where a dude put guitar strings in his piano and for some reason yt music put that in my liked music playlist. It doesn't even contain actual music, just explanations of what he's doing
Despite the fact that your Google Play Music "like" data is migrated into YT music, it doesn't seem to properly incorporate it in the algorithmically generated playlists.
What I've found is that I basically need to treat YT music as a clean slate, and specifically start playing and re-liking things (i.e., I'd re-play my favorite albums, thumb-down and thumb-up again the songs in them).
Now that I've done this, it's doing well enough - in some ways better than GPM was (multiple "mixes" presented as options with different clusters of artists in the summaries).
I can't say whether re-thumbing was what did the trick, or simply re-listening, though. And it's incredibly stupid that I should have to do this to make it work correctly.
and then there's still other issues like privacy or the thing being an expensive paperweight if you're Internet isn't working
If your gonna do this at least bring real content