Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

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I can't understand why I should talk to any of my devices as long as they are as idiotic as they are now and like you describe above doesn't have the slightest idea about how to handle context.

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 :-)

I agree. Google is collecting all of this data, but every time I'm going to Wegmans, "hey google, navigate to wegmans", its always, "I FOUND SEVERAL OPTIONS, WHICH WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO TO?". And in what is apparently always a surprise, I always want to go to closest Wegmans.

If you've been to Wegmans multiple times, why do you need to keep asking Google how to get there?

Didn't Google spend billions to buy Waze in order to route people around traffic problems?

I know how to get to work, and yet I enter it into my satnav every day because it then avoids traffic.

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.

That's what Android Auto does in my car as well-- as soon as I turn the on the car on a weekday morning, it gives me directions & traffic to work. Ditto for the commute home.

I use navigation primarily for the ETA.

Try "hey google, navigate to the nearest Wegmans"

I remember back in ~93, my dad told me that the Mac we had just bought had voice recognition. He warned me -- quite jokingly -- that he had to be careful not to say something like, "mynameisash, please empty the trash" because the computer might hear it and mistakenly delete items in the trash.

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 back in ~93

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!

Since half this thread gives workarounds, and since I had the same problem, I'll share my workaround: you can tell Google that a particular contact is your wife. There's a "relationship" field in contacts. Now I can say "call my wife" and it mostly works, although saying her name is still hopeless.

One of the funniest video on YouTube in my opinion is this 2007 demonstration of voice recognition on Windows Vista for Perl programming. The lad spends the first 4.5 minutes trying to enter „open (INFO“ before typing it out. Absolute classic.

„Thank you... delete thank you“

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzJ0CytAsec

Google is terrific at answering random questions compared to Siri, though. And I use my Alexa products for shopping lists. Not too long ago they added a feature where it tries to figure out what section of the grocery store things are in, and then it groups items on your shopping list into those grocery store sections. It's pretty nice and a simple "alexa, add <whatever> to my shopping list" is pretty bulletproof.

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