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TedDoesntTalk

What do people use digital voice assistants for besides to turn on/off music or other media? Genuinely curious.

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- To lock up at night (locks all the doors and closes the garage door if I left it open)

- To adjust lighting throughout the house, and to shut off all the lights across the entire house when we go to sleep

- To turn on the oven or air fryer, so it's preheated when we need it... can even be done from the car on the way home

- To turn off the oven when you have that thought "did I forget to turn off the oven?" 30 seconds after driving away from the house

- To adjust the thermostat without walking upstairs to adjust the physical thermostat

- To get an announcement when the clothes washer is done so I don't forget to move the clothes to the dryer

- To send a quick voice message to my wife somewhere else in the house using the "make an announcement" command

- To adjust the volume on the TV when I don't have the remote nearby

- To start pre-heating or pre-cooling my electric car in the driveway while I'm still getting dressed

- To reorder common household things like pet food or toilet paper, and it shows up at the door the next day

- To check the weather before leaving the house, to decide if I need a jacket or not

Those are nice smart home features, but why do you need specifically voice for that?

For example, displaying a rain cloud symbol and temperature seems just as effective and quicker than asking alexa.

He specifically mentioned that he controls a lot from the car. How would you do this without support for voice commands?

The little speakers can be put into every room, almost invisible, and for a fraction of the cost of a smart display.

Also, at night, smart displays suck. They always turn on, when you do not need them. Waking you up on the way to the toilet.

Not while I am driving and then by using my phone obviously.

Lots of these tasks are completely automatic (e.g. locking doors, announcements, turn things off when I am gone, motion sensors....) or simple inputs, e.g. volume buttons or a slider for oven temp.

> The little speakers can be put into every room, almost invisible, and for a fraction of the cost of a smart display.

My phone is in my pocket and thus in every room I am in.

So let me rephrase the question: If I use my phone, for which things is voice input so much better than just clicking on widgets?

Thus far I think hands-free while cooking and the UX for music/video are the standard examples. The question above was: Besides this, what are great use cases?

> My phone is in my pocket and thus in every room I am in.

Not everyone does this. Eg. My parents use Alexa but keep their cell phone by the door or on their nightstand.

> So let me rephrase the question: If I use my phone, for which things is voice input so much better than just clicking on widgets?

You already answered one: Cooking, etc. But also some people have other household members. The communal nature of the device matches the communal nature of a household. If I hear an announcement saying to put laundry in drier, I can act on it even if I didn't start laundry. Or if there's an timer to take something out of oven, I can act even if the cook is in the bathroom.

Voice needs no physical mode-switching. Ask and receive regardless of whether you've got your hands full doing something else, or looking at something else, or don't have your phone super-glued to your person.

There's also no tangential distraction when looking up information. If I'm going to travel I can ask for the forecast (daily or weekly) at places along the way without getting bogged down with unrelated web browsing or advertising.

Voice has the advantage that you don't need line of sight. If I think of the range of locations where a voice assistant can hear and respond, it's much larger than what could be easily covered by displays.

I feel like I'm living the life of a caveman, reading this.

But to be honest, only very few use cases would be applicable in my standards.

For example, never would I want remote controllable locks.

That was the first thought. The second one was how hard would it be to gain unauthorised access :^)

That said, home automation is pretty neat.

> - To lock up at night (locks all the doors and closes the garage door if I left it open)

Reminds me the opening scene of the 2022 movie Scream

They're genuinely pretty great when your hands are busy, or you want to do something relatively far away.

95% of my usage is in the kitchen, and I think both amazon and google are hugely under-valuing that space.

My ideal voice assistant would be something like the Fire TV cube (streaming shows along with voice control) where the thing is able to show timers/recipes/unit-conversions picture-in-picture while the show is playing, as I ask.

Frankly - Amazon acted like a chicken with its head cut off with the Fire TV cube, it should be exactly what I wanted, but the device is almost laughably bad at basically everything it should excel at, and I still hate them a little for it.

I'm an Apple device user (iphone, homepod, carplay, etc, but no mac computers) so I use Siri. I will admit that Google Assistant is superior in a lot of ways, but I am no longer in that ecosystem.

- Reminders (managing, etc)

- Navigation (mostly in the car, but Siri kinda sucks at this)

- Music

- Lists (grocery, etc)

- Speech to text entry/messaging if typing is inconvenient (walking dogs, etc)

- Quick math/unit conversion

- Quick searches

- Seeing what entertaining things it can do

- Managing apple health stuff

I do have some home automation stuff (lights, thermostat, etc, but no locks), but Siri is not configured to manage any of it as of now.

I have one in my kitchen that I use exclusively for setting timers when cooking. It's the only one in the house and is always set to microphone off if not in active use.

If that's your only use, I'm curious why you don't just get a simple timer? I'm assuming because of the ability to set timers hands free when your hands might be dirty or otherwise occupied.

Not OP, but a few things:

* It's way faster to say "hey Google, set a 10 minute timer" than to use any timer I've ever owned.

* I can have multiple timers running side-by-side that remember what they were for. "Set a timer for 30 minutes for the potatoes."

And, yes, as you mention, I can set a timer while my hands are still dirty or while moving on to the next step.

Long delay, but as for your first point I was thinking of a simple mechanical timer such as the one below. I think that could be set in around the same amount of time if not faster as long as it is kept within reasonable distance of where you stand while in the kitchen. Of course it doesn't solve the other problems.

https://www.amazon.com/Lux-Minute-Minder-Mechanical-Markings...

It's nice to do basic computing (other comments already list the possibilities) with voice+ears instead of hands+eyes not only if hands are full/dirty, but also to mitigate fatigue/injury (if one uses conventional HCI quite a lot already and doesn't want more exposure), or to achieve some quick goal while in the middle of some longer phone/laptop activity without losing focus of the latter.

Turning lights on and off. "turn on basement" as I move towards the basement door. "Turn off basement" as I come up the stairs with my hands full of stuff preventing me from reaching the light switch.

I should replace every single switch with a smart one to do that. Which kind of switches do you have? If they are Wi-Fi how do you avoid hitting the max number of devices your home router is able to handle?

ZigBee is the contemporary standard du jour for this stuff. Wifi is fine for some things but doesn't offer the same benefits (e.g. implicit mesh network of devices)

Either the switches, or, usually easier, the bulbs. As sibling said, Zigbee, but there is also Z-Wave (z-Wave is bigger in the USA, stricter. Zigbee, bigger in Europe, is more open, but you can get devices that suck in some way if you do no research). There is some new thing that’s related, Thread/Matter something, but I didn’t look into that yet.

There is no 'max limit' of devices your router can handle... especially if they are idle 99.9% of the time.

For stuff like the lights in basement/hallway/bathroom/storage, and other locations where you always need lights (no windows, not bed/livingrooms), I just have lights with PIR-sensors... Completely dumb, but turn on when you're there, turn off automatically a minute later. No privacy-implications, no need to yell to your assistant, and cheap/simple/effective.

Hands free Navigation (google maps)

Kitchen Timer

Set Alarm

Play Music

Check Weather

Open or close Garage door

Turn off everything in the loungeroom (theater)

Broadcast to the house when i want some ones attention

Send text messages (not very often though, this interface is very clumsy and i detest having to speak. like. a. robot. to. be. understood.)

Random factual questions, also unit conversions

Media, lights, weather, unit conversion, timers, reminders when I forgot to close a window ;)

Never used it, but I think that interacting with a computer while washing dishes would be cool

"Hey Siri, add $thing to the shopping list."

Hey Siri set timer 10 minutes

in kitchen when cooking stuff

My cooking-hob has a timer per place (so 4) ... and then the oven/microwave has it's own timer as well. No need for some timer that doesn't automatically turn off the device it's timing.

collapsing hn comments after i read them. Closing tabs of my browser while drinking coffee.

voice controlled personal robots

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