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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

The developers of these things need to stop treating people swearing at them as a time to lecture them and instead realize that if someone is swearing at it then they’re probably not satisfied with how it’s functioning in the attempts before that.

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Funny enough Google Assistant on Google Maps does this just fine. When it asks me if I wanted to navigate to the Pizza Hut that's five miles away or the one that's 38 miles away, it understands "the closest one, you stupid piece of crap" just fine.

Haha I wrote a HN comment years ago about the same issue. Everytime "do you want to go to the Wegman's 5 miles away or the identical Wegman's that's 20 miles away?"

I can see this being useful. There are multiple Krogers and Walmarts where I am. They vary greatly in quality and selection. Depending on where you are and what you want to get, you might not want the closest one.

But 95% of the time, they’ll just want the closest one. It’s a sensible default.

This only happened to me once, but I was leaving BWI airport and asked Google to drive home. I really only needed a bit of help getting onto I-70 because some of the signs were confusing. Well it started navigating and after a few turns, it definitely seemed off. Turned out it was taking me to a Home Health place. I've always been super careful since then to make sure Home was Home.

Alexa backend treats user swearing the same way it treats a repeated command or other negative feedback.

And how is that?

I assume they capture the conversation for 'manual review' and upload it to an S3 bucket to languish for eternity.

Glad someone is, been trying to figure out if there was a command in Siri to communicate I'm dissatisfied with how its wasting my time with the past query attempts, no luck so far although I've basically given up using the thing at all at this point.

The amount of times where I would ask 3 times and have to do the task myself anyway were too often.

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