I could never understand “assistants” like this.
I dream about “assistant” like Focus in “Horizon” – so in a more passive way.
For me, the best “assistant” is the one I don't pay attention to.
I dream about “assistant” like Focus in “Horizon” – so in a more passive way.
For me, the best “assistant” is the one I don't pay attention to.
“Alexa, set an egg timer for 12 minutes”
“Alexa, set an alarm for 6:45am”
“Alexa, play Stories Podcast on Spotify”
These or variations of these are the most used commands at my house. Passive assistants can’t really figure out that I or my kids want to play a specific podcast or when to set a timer when cooking. Lighting is another tricky one. Sometimes I’m reading and want bright lights. Sometimes I want scenic lights. Sometimes I want very low lights while falling asleep.
I suspect most people don’t use their smart assistants for shopping. I do occasionally ask it a random question like “what year was Einstein born” when I don’t feel like whipping out my phone or play an occasional round of 20 questions with my kids. But that’s rare compared to the typical usage.
What I want is an assistant that will handle all my bookkeeping for me. Right now, I have to log in to the account, then download all the statements for the last tax year. Evidently, no bank has such an option. Nope. You gotta do it month by month, click, download, save, back, back, click, download, save, back, back, until you scream.
Then ya gotta download the transactions for the last year in a format that quicken can use. You can download transactions for last week, last month, last 12 months. No option for "last tax year". So you have to manually enter 1/1/2021, then 12/31/2021, then confirm, then download, then save, then do it all over again for the CVS version.
Then you gotta poke around looking for the tax documents.
Then I gotta get the transactions for a credit card I canceled 6 months ago. But since I canceled it, I can't download the transactions.
It must be only me that has these problems. Why is that? Does nobody else need to pay taxes?
No, I doan need no help setting a $%^&# egg timer :-) Maybe if I become bedridden I'll need help flipping a light switch. Until then, nope.
When walking into a dark room carrying a heavy box it is often easier to use a voice assistant to turn on lights. It’s also frankly more fun.
What you are looking for is not a home assistant. You want an accountant + QuickBooks. For $1000/year or so you can get both and be happy. Intelligence is often cheaper than artificial intelligence.
As for turning on lights when carrying, that's why I have an elbow! The switch is at elbow height.
> It’s also frankly more fun
What, this isn't fun? https://www.amazon.com/Clapper-Sound-Activated-Switch-White/...
For one, my grandparents, didn't have nearly the number of light switches even with a comparable house size. And "just teaching" kids to turn the lights off is quite laughable. My kids know how to turn off lights and know they should turn them off when they leave the room. But knowing and always remembering to do it are two different things. I also forget to turn them off sometimes. I remember my dad grumbling quite a bit about having to go around turning off the lights or having to run back in the house after you get outside and see the lighted windows. Just one less little hassle.
> But knowing and always remembering to do it are two different things. I also forget to turn them off sometimes.
What is "sometimes"? You wrote "I'd have to spend half an hour a day traveling around the house turning off light switches countless times" which is definetly not normal and a clear case of your parenting not working. I also "sometimes" forget a light. About once a year, tops. I don't see how this isn't your brains failing to manage a very basic every day task.
Most of the time Google needs “Set a timer for 3 minutes”.
It's much more difficult than home automation, but I think this is the direction we're heading into. The incentives are there, because access to such data is valuable.
Slow steps
BTW, Quicken is the most rube-goldberg-esque program I've ever encountered. There's no UI consistency anywhere, the screen constantly clears and flashes and redraws, some check boxes cannot be clicked on, you have to Alt-key them, some places Paste does not work, and it blocks you while it updates itself every week or so.
What a mess of a program. I bet it was written by squirrels and poodles.
One insanely simple thing that'd be useful to me: local tide times. Can Siri or Google do this for me? No, not a chance. Best I get is "here's a web page", ie just a higher friction version of the thing I could have done myself.
I'm ok turning my music up and down or choosing a song. Let's make these devices actually useful and then I might sit up and start using them.
Alternatively, try calling you bank and asking you can get the statements emailed to you automatically. Most banks offer this in one way or another, although you usually get PDFs so some programming might still be necessary to transform the data.
See where this is going? Spending a weekend automating a program that you use only once, and have to recode every year, does not work.
Also, quicken cannot import PDFs. As for getting the statements via email - it's just as much work getting them one by one out of my email and into the proper place in my accounts.
What I want:
Download in one operation ALL the data in one zip file.
Now that would save me significant time. I've never had an account that allowed this. They're all different, but all about 20 minutes or so of clickety-clickety-clickety.
BTW, at least they finally stopped downloading each statement with the same file name (named "download.pdf", naturally). So I had to rename it as an additional step for each statement. It lead me to wonder didn't anyone who worked at that bank on the web site have an account at the bank?
But nothing ever changed, so I stopped bothering them with suggestions.
Some regular banks support it, you can use your existing credentials, and there are Node.js libraries for it. Downside is the metadata is lean. I think there’s a ~10char limit on the description? Like you get “2021-11-01 14:35, LONGNAMECO, $500” and that’s it. Don’t quote me.
A friend of mine does a shopping list on his "add eggs to shopping list".
It’s not that it looks useless. It’s sure looks pretty cool to be able to switch on the light with the sound of my voice.
But the privacy cost is extremely huge for something that isn’t that much revolutionary. I’ll just keep pressing the button. That’s less cool, I admit that and I’m even somewhat jealous. But I’m never going to allow Amazon (or any company) listen to me constant just not to press a button.
I respect and have no issue with your choice but it feels wrong justifying the utility without mentioning the drawbacks.
Not always possible, I heavily make use of Alexa while both my hands are dirty from baking or cooking. Both dumb units to metric, and setting timers.
But I am pretty happy with the voice recognition, so I’m currently waiting on Pi Zero 2 W’s becoming available again and replacing her with Rhasspy.
What did you do before your voice assistant? Did you leave the light on until such time that your hands became clean?
I don't think it's really a comparable to a voice assistant. It's more "Google Glass" than "Google Assistant".