Comment by ubermonkey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ubermonkey | Hacker News Reader

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We have an original large-size HomePod in the kitchen. Its MAIN job is music-in-the-kitchen, and it excels at that. It's secondary job is "Siri portal" for random information or timers or whatever (btw, did you know you can set multiple timers and give then names, like "set a pasta timer for 10 minutes" and then also "set a simmer timer for 30 minutes" and ask it for status on those by name?).

I have an ongoing sort-of faux-competition with my wife about how to ask Siri for things. She asks questions and gets frustrating replies, but when I ask them slightly differently I get good data.

I think my history with software make me subconsciously better able to formulate a question for Siri in a way that produces an answer other than "I found some web results...".

I SUSPECT it's mostly specificity, or asking for simple facts ("when was King Charles born?") and not derived facts ("how old is King Charles?"), but it comes up a LOT.

That same history of software means that I don't even ATTEMPT some of the stuff Siri is notionally capable of, like maintaining a shopping list. (Though I routinely use Siri on my watch or phone to add appointments or reminders.)

Aye, I have some history in software development as a UI designer. Including for something with natural language processing. So I have some heuristics for what and how to ask. But I feel like “add [x] to my Shopping list” where [x] is a fairly common would should be doable.

But also I didn’t know about named timers. So I appreciate that, that’s actually really useful. Huh, something I didn’t know about a voice assistant, it’s almost like there are issues with discoverability, who would have thought…

Yeah, I never really articulated it before, but Apple is a company with a history of emphasizing discoverability in interfaces. That maybe doesn't work quite as well for a voice interface.

OTOH, thinking of something to try and then being delighted it works (which is how I found the named timers) was a pretty cool experience.

> I think my history with software make me subconsciously better able to formulate a question for Siri in a way that produces an answer other than "I found some web results...".

Hah, very much the same. My partner will always end up asking me to ask siri to ask something because my slightly differently worded requests tend to succeed more often

It's topic drift, but this is a great example of a scenario that I think is interesting: the apparent existence of a skill that you cannot articulate.

Usually, if you're better than someone else at something, there are things you KNOW you are doing differently, and you can give pointers/instruction, right? In my bar-going youth I was a better than average pool player, but I could also help YOU with YOUR pool game by showing you what I was doing, right?

But sometimes these things exist at an unconscious level. The main example of this in my life is animal interaction, which I am pretty sure is due to countless inarticulateness lessons I learned from my dad, and by working with him at his veterinary clinic in high school.

I have joked for decades that I simply inherited the Kindly Veterinarian Vibe, because while I definitely CAN tell you simple things to do if you have trouble connecting with a dog or cat, but I can't transfer everything because I don't even know everything that I'm doing. A huge chunk of it is understanding the animal body language, and it seems like lots of people just suck at that, e.g.

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