It feels (anecdata) that Siri is doing a bit better on voice to tex when sending messages but much worse on simple commands like “turn off living room lights”.
Basically every new goddamn trend that is allowed to occur is about how datasets can be compiled from such marketed options.
That's why we don't have first-class convergence devices yet. It'd likely blend our home and mobile usage profiles too much.
Simple things like:
"Remind me to X tomorrow at 9am" "Add Y to the shopping list" "Remind me to do Z when I get home"
This is the only way I do reminders now and it's great. It's especially useful while driving, or when I'm in bed nearly asleep and remember something, I can just tell Siri without having to get up and use my phone.
And as far as smart home controls, being able to say "Siri, turn all the lights on" or "Siri, turn the heater on" without having to stop what I'm doing and walk around the house flicking switches is really nice.
Assistants provide a very noticeable QoL improvement for me in many aspects. I think that's more than most other products on the market can say. And that's not even touching on the lives saved from not having to use your phone while driving.
I'm believe the most valid use of AI/ML is to perform tasks that people either cannot currently do, or cannot easily do. For example, ai-based up-scaling of old video game pre-renders. It's not really feasible for a person to do this well, unless you simply rebuild everything with a team of artists. And you could argue that up-scaling images for a video game is trivial, since all video games are trivial. But, the point is that the task at hand requires the help of a computer, whereas a to-do list, or using a light switch does not.
1. In bed, all ready to fall asleep, you get up to get your notebook from your desk to add the reminder to your notebook.
2. Cooking with hands all messy, you wash your hands, dry them, go to your desk to add the reminder to your notebook.
3. Driving at 40mph, so you pull over in a parking lot, take out your notebook from your bag and add the reminder.
Yeah, I will take telling Google assistant to do this instead.
2. Don't get so messy when cooking, also it hardly matters if your temporary notebook gets a bit dirty.
3. Don't multitask when driving. Taking your eyes off the road is the main concern, but testing has shown driver's voice control systems to be distracting to a significant degree. And, voice assistants are at least somewhat similar.
Human memory is terrible and should be relied upon as infrequently as possible.
A todo entry or flipping lights via assistants also qualify as such tasks, if we broaden the definition of "easy". The flow from having the thought of an idea or a song to making a note or playing the song by just speaking out loud is just so convenient, without having to context switch from whatever one is doing. Controlling a set of IoT devices with custom commands is another good usecase.
Of course, not everyone has a workflow where a digital assistant fits well today. However, I expect that their usefulness will increase exponentially with time. We're surely heading to the sci-fi future where each house will have a personalized digital guardian responding to the wishes of the family, Jarvis style, no?
Siri is unaware of so many things.
A simple command that would actually be useful (but fails totally):
« Siri, remind me to buy milk the next time I go get groceries. »
And even then... I should not have to mention the part about « groceries ». The request should be perfectly understood with a full stop after the word « milk » and a reminder should pop up automatically whenever I am in a grocery (any grocery).
An even better Siri would also be able to a categorize things properly. For example, if later in the day I say « Siri, I will need chicken, butter, salt and cardamom for my next recipe », Siri should automatically add those to the « milk » next time I go to the grocery.
I've used Alexa since it came out and they've added annoying random suggestions over the years that you were able to turn off in various settings menus.
But in the past year or Alexa has been upselling me stuff or randomly telling me about features I don't want to hear about when I'm just trying to turn on a light. And it seems like there's now actually no way to turn this stuff off.
Does anyone know if you can turn off Alexa upselling or is it going to just be a part of having a smart home forever?
Salty, but I think I agree.
It seems that with AI/ML, choosing/defining your problem well is hugely important. Text to speech, even computer generated natural language is a definite enough task that engineers (and machines) have the feedback to make progress.
For me, speech recognition and assistants, along with software like Todoist, are able to keep me far more functional than I would be otherwise.
(joking aside, is that voice control developed in the US or in Germany?)
Seriously - my guess is that they try to perform the speech recognition client side (on the local hardware) and are less agressive on how they collect data for model training.
Unlike Google or some company in China which make thin clients that send everything to a central server where it is much easier to recognize, correct and train.
I get Siri via car play, but even car play is sandboxed because it can’t control things like the radio or temperature.
https://www.motor1.com/news/239477/toyota-android-auto-priva...
It's not just Amazon/Google, car manufacturers like Hyundai are selling data to Verisk, a data broker, who in-turn sells the individuals driving data to insurance companies and other entities [2]. They get people to "opt-in" by offering people free 'connected services' which has data-sharing buried in the T&C.
I'm sure other manufacturers are also going to do similar things as this allows them to generate additional, incremental revenue from user data about their end users.
[1] https://www.motor1.com/news/239477/toyota-android-auto-priva...
[2] https://www.verisk.com/press-releases/2018/april/hyundai-joi...
Example: I frequently switch between display profiles to suit what I need. Saying
"switch to cinema display mode" - works fine.
Saying:
"switch to user display mode" - 100% of the time results in the TV replying "which user would you like to select?".
Like...it's not my fault that the dumb TV has the custom profile named "User".
Google probably spent billions on voice recognition, but it's all worthless, because someone without an ounce of imagination just coded it to react to the words "change" and "user" as the user profile selector, the rest of the sentence be damned.
But back to cars - Google Assistant in Android Auto is equally shit. Try saying "hey google, open spotify", then "hey google, play music". 100% of the time, it switches from Spotify to Google Music. It's insane.
In fact I'd say Apple is just keeping spending money instead of shutting it down. When IBM Watson AI sank like turd in market it cut funding and let most of team go. I think Apple doing same might be more sensible.
-set alarm -next song -set timer -set reminder (e.g. "Siri set reminder 6pm close garage door") -send message to <person>
These comprise 99% of what I would want it to do, and it does it marvelously.
Ah, if there only was a way to disable it fully. Even when I disable Siri, it still randomly decides to call people when I boil a pot of rice
Microsoft is making a intervention with things purchase the way I see it.
What they have to do is provide a Linux version or at least O365 interop as good with Edge for Linux as Windows.
Nuance support and products are hopeless - my subscription for $120/yr stopped working with ios14 and the app refused to send password reset emails and then we discovered that no online account management existed and cancelled instead of relying on 8/5/300 telephone queuing.
Usual Apple reliance on their fans buying their devices no matter how bad the software is.
> Siri is especially bad when compared to Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, both of which are light years ahead.
Followed by a statement about the entire ecosystem, of which only a tiny amount is Siri.
> Usual Apple reliance on their fans buying their devices no matter how bad the software is.
The day Siri will work equal to/better than other competing systems, it will be used as a main reason for which you should buy an Apple device. The day before that, it will still be something that users actually don't want.
EDIT: and to be a bit more clear that I'm serious with this, it actually makes sense. If a feature doesn't work well, you find ways around it. And if you are used to an ecosystem, maybe you don't even know how well another ecosystem works. And finally, if that ecosystem works for you well enough - or that device - you probably really don't care about that missing feature.
Apple (and Amazon) get many things right, and actually seem to pay a tiny bit of attention to user needs. So it's really not worth playing with the google stuff because you end up in these weird nonsensical hells - everything is amazing, and then they just drop the ball in a key corner.
For example, my google work calendar is EASY to integrate with Alexa along with my personal calendar. Fantastic, what's my schedule today works great. Google - falls flat on its' face for this, despite being a paying customer of their Gsuite. Their approach is just full of excuses here, and ignores that this desired interaction works well on their COMPETITORS devices but not theirs.
Just one (of many) examples. They have some sort of eventually consistent backend more often for stuff so you also get weird states that you can't delete things, changes take longer to "flow through" etc.
My guess is that Apple management doesn't see voice assistants as the "next big thing" to differentiate themselves from the competition. I think VR/AR is where they are focusing and Siri is on life support.
Apple makes money selling devices to people.
Google makes money selling people to advertisers.
As a result Apple's maps and ML assistant aren't as good as Google's which harvests way more of people's data.
I'm perfectly fine with this trade off. Lots of things iPhones do are even presented at as the data never leaving your phone at keynotes/press releases, and ads. A bullet point notably missing from Android phones. I deliberately use Apple's admittedly worse maps application whenever possible because I know it's not telling Big Brother about me when I know Google maps is.
I would agree that Apple is significantly better on user privacy than Google or Facebook but that does not mean that the NSA isn’t sucking up all your data from Apple Maps.
Claiming that Apple isn’t “telling Big Brother about me” is at best naive and at worst dangerous misinformation that could put activists and whistleblowers at risk of having their location data harvested by the US war machine.
To say Apple is benign is ridiculous. To say they're better on privacy than google is just true.
This isn’t even really a criticism of Apple, it’s just the reality of the world that we have created since 9/11. I don’t believe any company that operates at Apple’s scale can keep its infrastructure totally private and secure from abuses of user privacy by the state. Especially if that company has infrastructure or employees in countries like the US/UK/China that are notorious for having extrajudicial/illegal/secret/unaccountable surveillance programs.
Totally agree with you on Google, they are the worst by far on user privacy. And we shouldn’t really expect anything different from a company that derives almost its entire revenue from advertising/data AND has been deeply connected to the intelligence agencies from Day 1.
I’ve never used anything non-Apple nor have I used any non-phone voice assistant, so I’m not in a position to compare, but as long as it calls the people that I want, sets timers and alarms as needed, and routes me to my city of choice, why would I care?
>I’ve never used anything non-Apple nor have I used any non-phone voice assistant
You're coming at it without experience. If you try the google and/or amazon version, you may still find Siri acceptable but I can absolutely guarantee you will not be surprised anymore when people call Siri shitty, because companied to amazon and google, it is.
And while I'm ranting... the thing I hate most of about all of these services is they don't have a profanity mode. In the privacy of my own home I have AN EFFIN' HUGE POTTY MOUTH. I love to curse. I LOVE IT. The fact that I can't get one of these services to talk to me like a middle school student is extremely disappointing. I don't want to be politically correct when I'm talking to a virtual assistant in a private setting. I want to say "Hey goognizzle, are there any good mother f***ing movies opening near me this weekend?" and get Samuel L. Jackson style "Here's the mother f***ing movies opening on mother f***ing Friday at the 5 mother f***ing theaters closest to mother f***ing you."*
Edit: TIL how to faux curse on HN. To type display "f***ing", I need to type out "f\*\*\*ing".
"Hey Siri, make a Facetime call to Bob Smith." "Which Bob Smith would you like to call? bobsmith@icloud.com or bobsmith@me.com?
How at this point does Siri not have even the most basic of logic to know that it's literally the same person. That's Apple's OWN service.
I'm indeed also a bit surprised that this hasn't progressed. It's still not possible to say things like "Turn on my living room lights and the hallway as well". It still feels very scripted where you have to say things exactly the right way and in bite-sized chunks to make it work. The same with Alexa by the way.
And a command that worked yesterday may not work today. (Gah!)
I've noticed it's been misunderstanding my girlfriend more and more over the past few months (she has a slight accent to her English, but nothing remotely difficult to understand), and lately it's started misunderstanding simple things that I say too. For example if I have Netflix paused and say "hey google, resume", 30% of the time it will give me search results for how to write a résumé instead of unpausing Netflix. I've had the Google Home for a few years now, and that literally has never happened before now. To get it to work reliably, I have to instead say "resume playback" or "resume chromecast".
Google's online advice is whenever the assistant fails to work just retrain the device. I remain skeptical that's the issue because it's not like my way of speaking has changed. Instead I have just switched to a new way to request what I need since reporting the issue via Google's vaunted customer service process seems likely to fail.
I've used both Siri and Alexa daily for many years, and used to rag on Siri a lot. In my experience Siri has caught up to Alexa on most fronts, and I find them more or less interchangeable my common use cases (home automation, timers/alarms, music, news/weather summaries, etc.).
That's not saying much since the Alexa bar is quite low. But like many Apple products, I'd characterize Siri's improvements as "slow and steady" for almost a decade now.
It feels like it does better in edge cases at the expense of the main cases.
Siri is way more than a pure voice "assistant".