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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

If this means alexa isn't a pet rock that can only reliably set timers, good for them.

Alexa and google home have been excellent for discovering new music. You ask them for a song you know and they play either a very weird cover version or something entirely different.

Siri has been helpful for increasing my 3-year-old's vocabulary: he'll ask it to play a song he knows, and Siri will pick out an explicit R&B piece full of all sorts of words he's never been exposed to.</s>

(Seriously -- there's a song with the title "The ABC Song", which as one might expect, is about the ABCs. But it's impossible to get it to play that via voice control; it only wants to play "abcdefu", which is not the same song at all, and has a very clear F-bomb 5 seconds in.)

Haha, the speed at which you need to be able to get it to stop is a key parenting skill. Saying that 4 seconds into a Tom Cardy song as my son says "but I love this one".

Maybe this is why some people are so good at the intro round at pub quizzes, you've got a few seconds to identify the exact song that's playing and mentally run through the lyrics before making a call.

I asked Siri today about the current week number (in German), and it failed. Just when I thought I've lowered my expectations enough, Siri can do one "better".

siri is honestly only good for basic question/answers. like "how is the weather going to be later" or "play X song", or "how old is X". i wish they integrated LLMs into personal assistants to truly have a conversational type experience

It might be a European vs. American cultural thing because week number is much less used in America, and Siri was developed by Americans. Maybe this is more of a localization failure than a generic functionality failure.

If it gave you an answer that seemed wrong, well, there are also several slightly different definitions of week number, so it could be that it chose one that wasn't the one you expected (maybe also a localization failure).

I am not a Google Home or Alexa user, and I honestly can't tell if this is meant to be sarcastic.

Semi-serious.

It regularly picks up an entirely bizarre song, however in doing so it's also found some bangers. My kid loves diggy-diggy hole and it played the wind rose version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34CZjsEI1yU) which is awesome.

I asked for I wanna be like you for the kids and got the expected one a few times. Then one time it returned the triple J version by the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD0VpmaSBjs) which became the new version for running around the room pretending to be a rollercoaster.

These are covers at least, but it will also just play the weirdest mishearings of something.

So semi-serious as I'm mocking it getting things wildly wrong, but also legitimately we discover new music this way.

> Then one time it returned the triple J version by the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets

The name made me laugh out loud but the recommends delivered this:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtua5kEsbGX_1HhY4OQAg...

Allready diggin the first one of 100, 95 to go. Thank you!

If you like this kind of thing, also checkout the radio 1 live lounge stuff. Been going for a long time so I think there's playlists with a couple of hundred songs and they'll be a small amount of the full sets. Often tends towards more acoustic but you can find some great covers.

> Then one time it returned the triple J version by the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets

The name made me laugh out loud but the recommends delivered this:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtua5kEsbGX_1HhY4OQAg...

Allready diggin the first one of 100. Thank you sooo much!

It's a joke. Google Assistant is notoriously awful and at home we often kid that if we ask it to play 90's rock on Spotify it will play some animal documentary on Netflix. It's not too far from the truth.

Oh I love that, you ask it for a song, it gets it wrong and thinks you want some video. Then it tries to play the video, can't and acts like you were daft for asking it to do that.

> play 90's rock ... some animal documentary ... not too far from the truth

Bloodhound Gang - The Bad Touch?

Somehow people have polluted and/or the assistants are too stupid to play well known songs from voice prompts. You get weird covers with clearly synthesized backing or random crap. It’s honestly weird. The covers shouldn’t even be on system half the time.

It is, or at least facetious

only somewhat sarcastic. At least once a week Alexa will play an off the wall unrelated song or a crazy cover of the desired song.

I'm still waiting for the day Google Assistant can answer "what time does Home Depot open in the morning?"

GA: "I found 3 locations, which one?"

Me: "The closest one"

GA: "I found 3 locations, which one?"

...

What was the point of feeding Google all my location history data if it can't even figure out which Wegmans I go to?

This is how I feel about pretty much all the most data-hungry services. It's never been about an improved use experience, because the quality is not there.

I can't count how many times I yelled/cried about Spotify trying to learn every mood I've ever felt (and what song would have been perfect for the moment!) only to play the same 4 songs over and over because I listened to one of them on purpose a week ago. (I no longer use Spotify. We'll see if Tidal falls into the same trap.)

google assistant is probably still not Bard powered, so it just means someone didn't coded some rule: user asked "closest one" -> locate user location -> locate home depot closest to that location

Like what type of input where they expecting here?

Alexa does the same thing talking to smart devices.

Me: Alexa, turn of the loft lights

Alexa: A few things share the name "loft" which one did you mean?

Me: Can you list them?

Alexa: I did not find a device named "can you list them loft"

Even better if they all open at the same time, which is the case near me

This reads like a sad variation of the traveling salesman problem.

I wish Siri did that consistently. Right now my Apple Watch Siri is unusable even to set timers. I don't know if the latest updates on my old watch struggles to run or what else the issue could be.

Old siri goes online, the new series 10 watch stuff is local, so might be better? Holding my breath lol .

There were a few weeks recently when she couldn't even set timers (the timer wasn't displayed on the screen leading to constant "Alexa, show me the timer" requests).

It's also good at setting alarms.

And converting weird US units to sane ones.

Voice computing is in the trough of despair. Tech companies over-invested in them. They aren't the next iphone (nothing will be). But like millions of homes we have two that we use for a few things. Expect improvements at a disappointing pace, leading to improved utility.

Many dunked on the apple watch, but it keeps getting better. Meta's next headset will be disappointing to some but have an audience and keep improving. etc.

They announced Alexa powered by some new LLM last week. Apparently it will go into beta sometime later this year.

That's their in-house LLM though. Amazon prefers investing $4B into Anthropic rather than using their own stuff. If you ask me, long ago they should've taken the top ML and engineering talent from Alexa and let them focus on building an in-house Openai/Anthropic. Then the engineers who left in Alexa could just integrate that stuff, as of the rest of the company (AWS, retail, etc).

That's the only thing I am using it for and I'd prefer if it stays that way.

Everyone has already moved to the much superior Alex.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0_Tt0En7v4

I hope the downvote you received for this comment did not leave you ... emotionally damaged.

Five PM reminder to myself - I'm still a disappointment :)

also good for "Alexa, how is the weather today?"

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