Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

Siri is brain-damaged. I am constantly disappointed with how stupid she is compared to Alexa and the gap is widening. I try to keep things as simple as possible with her because she always disappoints me. I wish Apple would open up a tiny bit of those 200 billion in cash reserves on improving Siri.

View on HN

You clearly haven't had the pleasure of trying to use voice control in a Mercedes-Benz. It makes Siri and Cortana seem telepathic by comparison.

Have you tried speaking to it in German?

(joking aside, is that voice control developed in the US or in Germany?)

German always works! (For cats at least.)

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.

Same with the Audi. I don’t understand why all the car companies aren’t licensing the assistant technology from the big tech companies and using it as the default.

I get Siri via car play, but even car play is sandboxed because it can’t control things like the radio or temperature.

The procurement decisions for the infotainment system are made around 5 years in advance of the vehicle release. The tech is obsolete before the car leaves the dealership.

Android Auto at least works, and that in turn has voice recognition that works. It's completely "meta" that I have to use voice recognition on my phone to call a number that triggers bluetooth that activates the hands-free and speaker in the car.

I would argue that in-car infotainment systems should be nothing but a dumb terminal into your phone. We already have devices with voice recognition, navigation, multimedia, etc. Why don't we have a way to just use that?

I've been looking for a single DIN car audio device that is nothing more than an amplifier with Bluetooth, but such a thing does not exist. My phone already does Music/Radio/Maps - all I need is the car head unit to connect to it and playback the audio through the car speakers. I've even started thinking about some sort of home built version using parts from a cheap Bluetooth speaker system (minus the actual speakers).

There's plenty of old-school single DIN devices that have bluetooth in them. You'll usually find they have a radio and other junk (e.g. mp3 over usb) but most are fairly simple and it shouldn't be hard to find one that stays in bluetooth mode all the time.

Yes, but they all look awful! XD

BlueBus is nice; but it works with the stock BMW head unit (nicely supports steering wheel controls tho). It was for pre-bt-enabled BMW's but I think it's able to be adapted to all k-bus-based cars, so roughly 1998-2010?

I completely agree. I wouldn't be surprised if this is what happens. It's partly there already.

Android Auto is pretty much that.

For the reason it took BMW so long to say yes to Android Auto - Amazon/Google will happily license the tech but want ALL the customer data off the car.

Few years back, and data collection techniques have only gotten more aggressive.

https://www.motor1.com/news/239477/toyota-android-auto-priva...

Here's an article from a few years back, from Toyota publicly stating they won't support Android Auto due to privacy concerns[1]

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...

If manufacturers use big tech voice assistance, it'd mean extra subscription for the car owners...really sick and tired of these "subscription" thingy. Microsoft Office used to offer one-time purchase, now it isn't an option. Are we going to have everything subscription eventually?

Because even the "big" tech from "big" companies is still shit. Have a 2020 LG TV with Google assistant built in, and it's a piece of hot garbage.

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.

The move to companies naming everything "Brand Name Generic Name" coincided with the move to voice assistants in the worst possible way. "iTunes" is unique but "Apple Music" is just two nouns - and we see this across so many properties.

Is that the voice control in the MBUX, or in older Mercedes?

In every MB I've been in, in the last decade, the voice recognition could be described as "entertaining".

Same in my Toyota. It has explicit instructions which, despite a few honest efforts, I can't seem to follow well enough for the assistant to work with any reliability. It's also painfully slow as it fails to understand, making the tumble into the pit of infotainment despair seem to happen in slow motion. Not sure how it ever hit the market.

Got a 2020 volvo. The voice controls are insanely bad. I can 100% reproduce a situation where saying "hey volvo, switch off the seat heating" turns it up to max.

I mean I can understand how stupid siri is. I find it so irritating that I always keep it disabled. But the point that anything Apple doing bad is for the lack of spending is hilarious.

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.

I think Siri is intended to be more goal oriented. I use it extensively, with very little complaint, daily-

-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.

Same here. I replaced the few Alexa devices in my house with Homepods over the last year and have notice no difference in how well they work because I don't use them for anything particularly complicated, and I don't _want_ to use them for any more than that. The only thing Siri seems to mess up for my usage is not interpreting things I put on my shopping list correctly, but usually in a way that's still recognizable (like "milk this'll").

> I find it so irritating that I always keep it disabled.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com