Hacker News Reader

Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty stunning that no one has hooked their voice assistant up to an LLM yet. Alexa, Siri, Google, etc. are all trash that could easily be improved 1000x by leveraging existing LLM technologies.

View on HN

I believe it's because it's at least a magnitude more expensive to run an LLM instead of a basic voice assistant ML model. Especially when considering anyone who has purchased a Google Nest Mini can use it, for free, forever.

run "set timer" and "what's the weather" and "turn on the lights" through some regexes as a first pass and save the LLM for the complicated stuff. actually, with some caching they can probably cut costs pretty heavily there too.

I’m guessing they are already doing this. Adding an LLM is asking to add a very expensive thing to the long tail of queries which likely cannot be cached.

And when you consider these voice assistants already feel at risk for further investment due to subpar results, it makes sense. Bit of a catch-22 though as many of us have given up on expecting much out of our existing ones

But a lot of the question /responses could be trivial cached. No need to run expensive LLM every time for the same basic "how are you today?" prompts, it only has to be cached once.

Caching static requests alone is hard enough. With all the ways you can ask this question, welcome to the most complicated caching backend ever. Caching exact matches would also not help much because of this.

Then you’re kind of defeating the purpose of an llm.

Fixed responses for common queries is what we have now.

Not to mention that LLMs tend to be very wordy right now. I’d hate to way 20 seconds to hear my phone say “As a voice assistant I’m not aware of the exact menu of the Thai restaurant on 2nd, but I have opened a google search for it and found the following results.

…”

"You are a Siri-style voice assistant. Be succinct and terse, but polite and helpful." seems to work okay with ChatGPT.

It’s been a mixed bag for me. Sometimes the responses are still wordy, especially when you hit one of the “As an AI…” gates

> Google Nest Mini can use it, for free, forever

Is that a contractual obligation? otherwise what stops the Mini from going the way of a Jamboard?

Google apparently already started, it was linked in the article:

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-assistant-with-bard-n...

That will be great, everyone expects much more from "AI" (and at least I consider voice assistants to be an early AI prototype) and it would be great to have voice assistants understand what we ask better (like ChatGPT would, and perhaps Bard).

You can do this on your iPhone for sure via a Shortcut. https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/how-to-use-chatgpt-...

Alexa Let's Chat was announced last month, but not yet launched.[1]

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/b?node=118801773011

Unironically Mercedes has made their voice assistants in the car leverage ChatGpt.

Something is really wrong when a car company is beating tech companies to the punch with tech innovation.

you don’t like getting the weather and unsolicited google results?

Meta's 2nd version of their smart glasses replaced the traditional voice assistant of the first one with a LLM based one.

As a computer, i find your trust in technology amusing. /s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com