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Comment by goosedragons | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that's true. It's way faster for things like smart lights and playing music. The problem is it's still so limited for other things. For example I can tell Alexa to play The Simpsons on Fire TV, it will do so on Disney+ but always the first episode even though the last watched one was in Season 15. It also can't seem to find my purchased episodes from iTunes (watchable with the Apple TV app on Fire TV). Simple searches also have a high chance of being misunderstood still with poor results.

I think if the accuracy was better and more content/things were available through voice it would be a pretty good input method for any scenario where you don't need visual feedback.

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Selecting content via voice only works when you can either name exactly the content you want, or you are choosing a general category to play.

Browsing content, or looking it up, via voice is slow and playful, it always will be. Who what's to be saying "next", "scroll down", or have a full on conversation with an AI to try and work out what you want to play? Our fingers on our hands have evolved to be incredible at interacting with things, we are good at using them. Touch screens or physical UIs will never be superseded by voice.

So yes, there is a small use case for voice for controlling music/tv, or controlling a few things in the home (heating, blinds, lights) but thats it, I don't believe there is this massive opportunity to expand it into our everyday lives where we are constantly interacting with devices via voice.

You don't need to name content exactly. Saying "Alexa, play the sandwich song from Frozen" for example will correctly play Love is an Open Door. Ideally this kind of thing would work for TV and movies too, web searches as well.

Humans evolved language to communicate ideas, wants and desires to others for thousands of years. Obviously voice UI is not there now but maybe someday the experience won't be much different than asking the movie rental store clerk for their recommendations for a romantic comedy.

> asking the movie rental store clerk for their recommendations for a romantic comedy

The only people who ever did that were in a romantic comedy.

>Saying "Alexa, play the sandwich song from Frozen" for example will correctly play Love is an Open Door.

I bet ya some engineer at Amazon hooked that up manually when they saw a bunch of requests failing, so that’s only gonna work for popular fuzzy naming conventions. I don’t want to have to think “is this a way lots of people are gonna request this song?” before saying it that way.

That is still an example of knowing the content that you want to play exactly, you just don't remember its official name - and yes, search engines have gotten pretty good at this.

The more relevant use case is "hmm, I'd like to listen to some prog rock, let me browse what Spotify has and see what takes my fancy". Sure, I could say "VA, play prog rock", but I don't want it to choose for me: I want to browse the available content to remind myself what are my options, and choose one when I see one that looks interesting.

This is a real problem, though the problem is not technical, it's purely contract/legal: Disney+, AppleTV (all content providers actually) refuse to allow third parties to know what you've watched, because viewer data is closely protected

That's why an opensource ToS-violating assistant has chances to work better than legal ones, they can just scrape all those infos off internet. But then, once you go into that grey area, you just end up pirating content already.

To be fair, that’s an issue with siri integration, not siri itself. Kinda sad that Apple’s own products doesn’t implement that properly :/

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