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Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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I'm not sure if that's what Google is doing. More than half of my queries result in a "Let me google that for you" response where it pulls up a search page.

Apple's "assistant" is similarly useless. The best use case I have for it is when I'm driving and pondering about something silly so I ask it: "How does X do Y?" or similar, and the response in 99% of the cases is "I can't show this to you right now".

Alexa takes "the customer is always right" a little too far:

  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!

(The true answer is more like 5 months: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/infant-and-todd....)

Not having lists means they can collect more training data.

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.

Unfortunately there's also drift in behavior that comes from retraining. "OK Google, play NPR news headlines" get different results some days than others. Sometimes I get the latest hourly news, sometimes I get a robot voice reading headlines to me. Sometimes asking to dial someone calls them, sometimes it returns search results. Yadda.

Yes, is there a list of every command a human can execute or can work with?

Yes, actually, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English

  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.

Even Includes 200 picturables: http://ogden.basic-english.org/wordpic0.html

"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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOUTfUmI8vs

Anyone reminded of XKCD's "Up goer five" strip (https://xkcd.com/1133/), or is it just me?

He expanded the idea into a book: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer

> 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…

I would love to see something similar to Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammer for other languages. It seems like it would be a great tool for learning a new language.

Not sure what side of the debate you're taking here, but I think you've outlined the issue perfectly.

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.

> (Ok, so obviously the possibilities aren't endless, right?)

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.

By that logic the calculator app has an (effectively) infinite amount of functionality since there is an infinite number of integers which you can add together.

Somehow though they still list all the features.

> By that logic

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.

> This does not follow from the above

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.

> 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.

I'm not giving a middlebrow dismissal. There exists a real discoverability problem with virtual assistants, and asking users to "just try things" leads them to try things that don't work, and then conclude that the assistant must not be as useful as they thought.

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?

You should do some self reflection on why you felt the need to make a comment just to make yourself look smart.

> why you felt the need to make a comment just to make yourself look smart.

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.

> It's borderline trivial.

> 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.

There isn't, but a partial list could be assembled.

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.

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