Maybe it’s just me but this feels unaddressed and that seems ridiculous.
Why is it so hard for me to find a single, precise location on my phone with an enumerated list of every command Siri or Google can work with?
The likely answer here is that the engineers who work on such products would scoff at the idea that their work amounts to a simple list of commands. In their minds, they’re working on a natural language virtual assistant, whose understanding of user input is “intelligent”, and it should know what you want regardless of how you phrase it. Want to do something? Just ask! Treat it as if it's a person! The possibilities are endless!
Never mind that its actual functionality (y’know… the things it can do when it understands you) is embarrassingly finite and boils down to a “list of commands” anyway.
If one were to take the 25,000 word Oxford Pocket English Dictionary and take away the redundancies of our rich language and eliminate the words that can be made by putting together simpler words, we find that 90% of the concepts in that dictionary can be achieved with 850 words.
The shortened list makes simpler the effort to learn spelling and pronunciation irregularities. The rules of usage are identical to full English so that the practitioner communicates in perfectly good, but simple, English.
We call this simplified language Basic English, the developer is Charles K. Ogden, and was released in 1930 with the book: Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar.
"A widely known 1933 book on this is a science fiction work on history up to the year 2106 titled The Shape of Things to Come by H. G. Wells. In this work, Basic English is the inter-language of the future world, a world in which after long struggles a global authoritarian government manages to unite humanity and force everyone to learn it as a second language."
- Sounds pretty close to Siri and the other digital assistants to me. Ever watch people from none English countries use their smartphones? Not all of it is implemented yet but this is almost all you need to run an empire.
Here it is deployed in favor of much needed disciplinary action for two Scottish people:
There was a moment when call centers started deploying “just say it” en masse - and I was literally in panic. Luckily, they brought back “or enter” pretty soon and also en masse.
To be fair to robots you protein constructs are not much better. In a two mile radius of our company’s office humans trained themselves to understand Russian accent pretty well. But beyond that…
Engineers: "We couldn't have a list of commands, that's not how humans work, you're supposed to treat Alexa like a human, and the possibilities are endless"
Users: "Ok, then. Alexa, take out the trash."
Alexa: "Sorry, I can't do that."
(Ok, so obviously the possibilities aren't endless, right?)
I can somewhat understand general knowledge queries. For those, you can totally make the case that there's just too many things you can ask about to enumerate them all.
But imperative commands, like sending text messages, setting timers, or home automation? There's a finite list of those, since at the end of the day they actually have to be authored by some human who's writing a (say) Alexa skill. The number of utterances that may map to those skills are unbounded, but the number of skills aren't. So yes, at the end of the day, for "command" like things, they really should be able to give a list of them.
This does not follow from the above. The set of positive integers is countably infinite. So is the set of positive even integers. Even if "half of the positive integers are missing!" there are still "endless" even postive integers.
Somehow though they still list all the features.
This doesn't follow at all. It's not what I said and I find it difficult to believe that you even think it's what I said.
Well, I elaborated after. There's an actual finite set of skills that are coded up by actual engineers. A natural language system isn't hallucinating the ABI for the function calls that send text messages. There's code there which takes the utterance and sends the texts. What I'm saying is that you can take an inventory of what skills have been written (and/or are installed), and y'know... document them somewhere.
Sure. I didn't take exception with anything except the standard HN middlebrow dismissal.
Moreover, when an assistant doesn't do a thing, you're unlikely to try it again later; instead most people will conclude "I guess it can't do that" and move on. If they add the feature later, it's too late.
With every failed request, your confidence that an assistant really is intelligent and can understand you, diminishes more and more. Every time a user hits a dead end with a virtual assistant, it doesn't encourage them to try more things that do work, it instead gives the user less confident that anything will.
I can't count the number of times my wife has been surprised I can get Siri to do things. Her typical response is "I can never get her to understand me so I just stick with timers." It's a real problem, and I'm not being dismissive of anything.
In contrast, reread your comment in this context. You're taking my comment, reading in the least charitable way, condescending to me about the meaning of finite when the rest of my comment clarifies what I mean, and being completely dismissive of the point I'm trying to make. How can you say I'm the one issuing middlebrow dismissals?
I hardly think it made me look smart. It's borderline trivial. The parent comment was insanely reductive in the stadnard HN style. I was hoping to help reduce the appearance of future such comments.
Sibling comments indicate that it had no positive effect. Such is life.
> I was hoping to help reduce the appearance of future such comments.
> Sibling comments indicate that it had no positive effect.
I'm really not trying to attack you here but this honestly reads like a high-school kid trying to make themselves sound smart by emulating spock from star trek.
Most human interactions are context-triggered and heavily scripted.
This is easy to see on social media where responses to a popular trigger post fall into groups. A lot of people make one of a small number of generic expected responses, and there's an even smaller number of funny/off-beat posts - which all make the same joke.
Occasionally you get a truly original inventive reply. But only very rarely.
I have a vague memory of a fringe AI startup which has been trying to formalise that contextual database since the 90s.
Me: Alexa, when do babies double their birth weight?
Alexa: According to an Amazon customer, some time within the first month. Does that answer your question?
Me: No!
Build a database of all the attempted interactions. Cluster them by task. Sort by most used (or most monetizable) that the system can’t support today. Bam! You’ve got a rough futures capabilities roadmap.
It’s more complicated of course but here you literally have a large customer base telling you what it wants, but your product can’t yet do, regularly.
I know for a fact that it isn't complete. But most of the "secret" ones that I am aware of were very obscure and usually buggy, so maybe this is all of the officially supported ones.
o it changes. who cares if you know even some "commands"... it'll break. I used to ask google maps when driving "Ok Google, ETA". It's been many many years since that stopped working.
o can't change name/ATTN keyword. how dumb is your AI that you can't even rename _your_ assistant. /s
Commands would suddenly lead to web searches, I'd then have to Google the new set of magic words to make it set a reminder or whatever, only for it to break again two weeks later.
Because engineers (and managers) contrive problems like this to the point they are useless solutions.
You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and egregiously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33585475
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33550821
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33547727
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33472366
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33472317
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33468223
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33451816
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33447930
If you keep doing this, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit, we'd really appreciate it.
I am using HN in the intended spirit, and I'm sorry that you're letting the echo chamber color your perception of perfectly acceptable comments. You can email me if you'd like to continue discussing this in a more professional manner (why else would I fill it...?), but I have to say this is an appalling showing of leadership on your behalf, and I hope you address it soon.
Public intimidation does not make for a safe and healthy culture. Period.
The rest? Get real. Cherry picking at it's finest. You're barking up the wrong tree here and I have no problem defending those comments ad nauseum.
I'll say it again since you're really not getting it: feel free to email me if you'd like to continue this in a more professional manner. I'll keep flagging comments that blatantly ignore this.
How many times is enough? I've now politely asked three times to be contacted via email if you need to, twice specifically for this altercation. Please don't make the same mistake a fourth time, as an admin and representative of this dying site.
It's a concept called inclusivity, I think you should read up on it a bit.
[0] https://github.com/openai/whisper [1] https://github.com/mozilla/TTS
Anyway we meant to bake something but instead absolutely roasted a metal pan and wire rack that merged into the glass somehow.
My wife thinks it’s kind of funny because the Disneyworld “Carousel of Progress” shows a very similar event happening due to voice controls, which they predicted in the 1960s!
It's both a static list (available to everyone) and a dynamic list (available only to you).
Having seen all the dead products at Google. Who would get rewarded for this/compensated? Would the complexity in building the list increase ongoing costs with an unclear return on investment?
Did that ever make it to release? I can't remember seeing it on my actual phone.
That said, English is a difficult language and I'm not at all surprised that people get through school without fully grasping the names for grammar concepts, even if they use them every day.
It was a bizarre but very educational moment: I use English like I write code: I have no formal education on it but I seem to do fine.