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Comment by fredley | Hacker News Reader

I got a free Google Home puck with some purchase a while ago. The only thing I've used it for is setting timers in the kitchen, which it's quite well suited for as it's genuinely useful to be able to do this hands-free, and to have multiple timers going at once. None of the other things it can do are of interest.

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From what I've heard about these products since their introduction, setting alarms is the one thing that they're unambiguously useful for.

edit: For that they don't need to be networked, of course.

They are also handy at dimming/turning lights on/off or starting Spotify playlists while in the shower. Nothing essential TBH.

[Edit] Google Home seems to be pretty good at separating your voice from background noises, like shower/TV.

Works well for playing radio stations too. I also use my Echo to control my FireTV. Nice to be able to pause and grab something without hunting for the remote.

The speech recognition is performed in the cloud, not locally, so under the current architecture they do indeed need to upload the audio capture following the wakeword.

One of the other things I used them for frequently before disabling it on all my devices and removing all of the networked mics from my house was things like "remind me to $THING at 21 tonight".

Fwiw, starting in iOS 15, Siri will process speech on-device, which is huge.

It's other on-device processing that's planned in iOS 15 (such as scanning my local files without consent to report on me to the police) which is going to keep me from using devices with it.

I hope this doesn't make Siri's quality even worse, but it seems inevitable.

It's much slower even with the A12's dedicated cores for this purpose, but I assume that'll improve over time.

> The speech recognition is performed in the cloud, not locally, so under the current architecture they do indeed need to upload the audio capture following the wakeword.

I bet it wouldn't have to be if its vocabulary were restricted to timer related words.

It doesn't have to be, but it makes the device cheaper and they're going to gobble your data up in the cloud anyway.

Try this - turn on airplane mode and go into the notes app and do a dictation.

On the iPhone, the speech to text can be done on the phone. I'm not sure if this is the case for Siri, but it doesn't need to be done in the cloud.

That said, the words to intent mapping doesn't appear to be something that the on phone model is able to handle.

Same thing for me with my Alexa devices. They're a good kitchen timer and nice speakers, but everything else is not so great. Often they don't understand me at all and they need to be rebooted once a month, because they'll hang themselves up.

Ha ha that's all we use our Alexa for. I really should just get rid of it. I once set it to turn our smart bulbs red and play Star Trek red alert sounds. That was fun for 5 minutes.

Same. Using it to add things to my shopping list is useful too.

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