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Comment by illiarian | Hacker News Reader

A few updates back Apple made Siri quiet. I re-enabled confirmation on every action because I don't trust that it recognizes exactly what I'm saying.

Google's assistant is generally better, but still not perfect. I wish the confirmations would stay but become shorter. Not the "Yes, I have done X for you do you want more" that all these assistants do.

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Indeed, all it would need is a short confirmation tone. What's incredible is how many complaints, hacks, and workarounds there are online for something that should be a simple fix on Google's side. I don't think this update really fixes it at all because my speakers are in different rooms from my lights.

This wouldn't be so annoying if they would work on context-aware volume. I typically have my speakers on high volume during the day to listen to music, but don't really appreciate when later that night it blasts "OK, TURNING OFF THE MASTER BEDROOM LIGHT!" - seems like all it would take is having the device respond at approximately the same volume you said "hey Google"

Siri is better at this, since it just turns on the light, that’s feedback enough. If the device is in another room, it will give off a tone that the operation succeeded.

This is where Alexa has the edge, if you whisper to it, it whispers back (or at least responds at a low volume).

Trying to get it to answer random search type questions is a disappointment, ending mostly with quoting some page.

I wonder when the ChatGPT skills for it will land (assuming they haven’t already).

alexa seems to be having a hard time making money, you might want to keep your eyes peeled for big changes.

Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year[[2022]]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...

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