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Comment by gorkish | Hacker News Reader

This is my experience with any 'smart assistant' product that is or ever has been.

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.

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My issue is that I found out the special incantations two years ago, and then they changed (I presume) something about the core language processing logic, and now none of that works.

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.

Yeah, my experience is related, in that it seems to think "lamp" and "lights" are synonyms, so I have a lamp in my living room, but "turn off the living room lamp" turns off all the lights in the living room, not just the light called "living room lamp." It's like, at this intermediate level of intelligence that's particularly annoying: too smart to just literally use the names I assigned, but not smart enough to actually intelligently apply synonyms or fuzzy matching. Worst of all possible worlds.

> Worst of all possible worlds.

At least there are no tribbles.

Siri (HomePod) was getting confused with my “turn everything off” incantation, so I’ve changed the name of the ‘scene’ and now when we leave the house we instruct her to “PUT THAT COFFEE DOWN”.

Because coffee is for closers.

I had to laugh out loud. I suddenly envisioned a future where we slowly developed an arsenal of such workarounds for the flawed automation creeping into every aspect of private and public life, where it reached a point where people just accepted that that's the way things are done. My grandchildren naturally yell "put that coffee down" when leaving the house, because that's just how you turn off everything. Sure there must be some ancient reason why it's exactly that phrase, but who cares? That's how smart people decided AI is supposed to work.

There's already a host of those artifacts in other technologies. Ctrl-Alt-Del, for one.

“The Hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy” had a great bit on this in 1979, describing gesture-controlled televisions that randomly changed channel unless you sat perfectly still, etc.

I get this trying to make reminders to add things to the grocery list with Siri. Siri always intercepts it and says "There is no 'Grocery' list. Would you like to make one?"

But I already have a grocery list and a process for it. I just want a reminder to add something to it.

Try it in two steps:

"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.

My brain can easily misplace the thought in that time. Especially if I run into problems or am frazzled. I usually just open a note app since it limits the risk of a memory-shattering distraction.

I also have Philips Hue.

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.

Just out of curiosity, why would you want your rooms to be green?

Some people claim I live in a cave and green lights match the season. I just thought I'd play the part. Maybe I'll try red next week and see how that goes.

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 am glad that you get so much more color-related happiness from your lights than I do.

Ahh well I would say that while Philips Hue (name brand) does work well, it is too expensive for the value provided -- by about 2x to 3x. If they were half their current price then I would recommend them to affluent friends and family. If they were a third their price I would recommend them to even the less affluent friends and family. Even then it's significantly more expensive than a plain light bulb (even LED ones) but for that you gain colors and ease of remote use.

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. ;)

Yeah, I like my Hue lights, but they are quite pricey. Part of the cost is that are calibrated well, though. If you have a mixture of white temperature and RGBW lights in one room and set a scene, they will mix decently.

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

They're pretty expensive too especially considering the warranty is pretty short. From their warranty[0]:

> [...] 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

I love the fact that I can call out any X11 color name.

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".

> ask Siri what color it is

Never even thought of this. That's modern day software discoverability for you

It’s iOS.

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.

I just set up some routines with explicit names:

“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.

Same here. I really wonder how these products sell. The most basic things dont work. And if they are confused, then for real. For about 2 years, when Siri happened to misunderstand the command "Call ..." it would answer "OK, calling you" and actually try to call my own number. This is so weird that it actually feels like someone wrote that piece of code to prank the user.

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.

> I really wonder how these products sell.

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.

Well, I have a Sonos One SL, so I know why you like the HomePod form factor. but I explicitly got the SL version because I really dont see any use for a voice assistant. I think the success rate of playing specific artists or tracks might be related to how mainstream your choice of music is. In my experience, the success rate is very bad, actually beyond useable.

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...

A UI with next to zero discoverability and an incredibly broad input set ("all speech") must really work for most conceivable inputs, or only die-hard enthusiasts will keep trying.

Yeah, why can't I `man Alexa` to get its speech UI syntax the way I can `man bash` to get its command line UI syntax?

Why not?

Why not?!

> 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.

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.

That's the worst thing. It used to work well for me.

All technology is becoming more and more this way for me.

Same. It's been getting less smart over time.

This is the same way I feel about Google Maps. Especially with the new streamlined/cards UI. Everything is objectively worse and I can't even force it to act like it used to. Actual, useful functionality has just been lopped off.

And Google Search.

Yep. Google has been getting progressively worse at recognizing my words over the past two years. It's also started randomly capitalizing words that aren't proper nouns and seemingly has a blacklist of words that it clearly recognizes as speech but refuses to type such as "o'clock".

"Take a look boss, I made the AI better yet again! After the last change, telemetry shows our users are talking even longer to the assistant each time they use it. Engagement is up, they seem to love interacting with it."

And whoever decided that the Google Assistant "clang!" sound needed to be the loudest, most piercing sound physically possible to generate with a smartphone deserves to be drawn and quartered.

My dad and I hacked ours apart and now have some interesting chess games going.

> 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.

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”.

It's like someone took the maddening random guesswork user experience of mid-80s text adventures, mixed in mediocre speech-to-text and decided to base an entire product category around it. I absolutely do not get it.

I think we need something extremely close to AGI for natural interfaces to work.

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.

My toddler wants to hear a song 1000x, I can't do something like "Play 5 little monkeys jumping on the bed on repeat or in a loop or 10x" I have to tell it each time.

this is a feature, not a bug. "Hey google, play five little monkeys ten thousand times on max volume and disable input"

Could you just make a 10x looped version with Audacity? Or can it only play from its own library?

yeah but what happens when they want to listen to surfin bird on repeat the next day and banana phone on repeat the day after that? awfully clunky workflow.

Once you start playing the song once, you can generally say "repeat on" and it'll loop the song. YMMV depending on where the song is coming from.

Adding this to my book of spells

Your dog would like you to know that he is most certainly NOT as stupid as a computer.

I don’t even bother using them for timers anymore since it’s usually easier to do it on my watch. Voice assistants are limited to navigation requests while driving for me

It's all just a big charade from these companies, as if they ever work. Billions of dollars made from devices that don't even work, but people buy them because they've been lead to believe they work. They're worse than useless, because they give you hope that they actually do what the companies say they do. What a sham. Maybe in another 10-20 years.

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