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Comment by pflenker | Hacker News Reader

On top of what you mentioned in your first sentence, any ideas to improve discoverability are horrible. I hate it when Alexa does not play my podcast right away but explains to me how I can change episodes. I despise Alexa for telling me that I have some notification before starting my timer. And so on - any voice only attempt to explain me something without me asking for it means adding a lot of friction between me and my goal.

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The constant "By the way..." from Alexa drove me nuts.

If you say "Alexa, stop by the way", it'll get the device to stop responding with follow-ups for ~24h. I ended up creating a routine that runs every night at 4am to lower the volume to zero, automatically say "stop by the way" to the device, and then raise the volume a minute later, and Alexa has stopped with the follow ups

I just discovered this today, but if you whisper to your Echo, it will skip all of the "by the way" BS (it will also reply in a whisper, which is kind of creepy, but you win some, you lose some).

Is it actually lowering the volume or is it fake whispering at the same decibels? I could kind of believe either.

Yes... when it does anything other than what I ask, it makes me feel like it's wasting my time.

Alexa recently started responding with "Good afternoon! <the normal response>" and it irks me more than it probably should. I've looked to see if I can turn it off and can't find the option.

I don't need pleasantries from a machine.

I got slightly irritated by the "Good afternoon!" message earlier today. Especially because I had already used Alexa a few times before it did that.

goal of assistants is to create a parasocial relation with your young kids so that advertisement is more effective.

notice how young kids associate ok google with a way to install games and reach their YouTube videos.

all those feature are for that end. you're not the target market. Good night!

Can you instruct it to "stop the greetings - go straight to the response"? Doesn't Alexa (yet) have some LLM behind it that will create a profile just for you?

Alexa is basically a CLI where you use your voice instead of typing

I get "good evening" but not the corresponding "good morning".

Wow, is it possible that algorithmically it has decided that you are not a morning person?

As a Brit, when I bark "Alexa, set a timer for 5 minutes" and Alexa prefixes her reply with "Good evening <pause>", TO ME that sounds like a bitter correction-by-example to my abruptness. It's the sarcastic opposite of a pleasantry.

Well put, and it makes sense in the usa context too.

The issue is that everyone removed hierarchical menus and replaced them with... nothing.

There is no command ontology anymore. Consequently, discovering commands in-app is UX anathema.

"Use the internet, buddy. One of our customers probably documented how-to somewhere on it."

Seriously though. The development of every company to just trash faq's or an "assistant" or third party forums is awful. Trying to get help with technology is almost always infuriating now.

I recently had to contact windows help, and they were useless. The windows forum points to a third party software that I am convinced is malware.

And while I'm ranting, why can't the download folders in windows be set to group by "none" and sort by "name" by default? Why are both "most recently edited" by default? AND WHY CAN'T I CHANGE IT MICROSOFT?

Maybe WinSetView [0] and the options [1] it provides might be of use to you? It was able to resolve the issues I was facing so hopefully it can work for you as well.

[0]: https://github.com/LesFerch/WinSetView

[1]: https://github.com/LesFerch/WinSetView/blob/main/README-more...

Spot on! Lot of voice assistants have been following "if we could" line instead of "if we should line". For many straightforward applications, clicking through well defined interface can be the least error prone way to get the job done.

A usual conversation my wife had with Google:

> okay Google set a timer for 15 mins

Certainly, and did you know I can also set an alarm for 6 am in the kitchen?

> Fuck off Google

I'm not dying for them to record more than absolutely necessary, but I really hope all the voice ui engineers do log curses to know when their app is doing annoying stuff. The number of times these things screw up I definitely get really spicy and hope that feedback makes it back.

I tell my kids not to rage against voice assistants in case the machines finish up in charge.

Shut up, toaster!

Luckily the Google Assistant is basically worthless.

Setting a timer and have it remind you that you could have set an alarm instead is annoying, but there have been multiple examples where we set a timer and the Google home mini seems to forget it.

> okay Google, set a timer for 1 hour

>> Certainly, and did you know that I can also look up Wikipedia entries for you.

>> Timer for 1 hour has been set and is starting now

> okay Google, how much longer left on timer

>> You don't appear to have any timers set at this time.

I'm pretty sure that our robot overlords will either forget, get distracted with generating mis-information, or become artists painting portraits of furries.

I remember (maybe its still like this!) there used to be a page you could go to and see all your alexa voice clips since forever. It's amazing amazon has gone so long not caring about privacy without backlash.

EDIT: Yep its still there! https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve disabled notifications on my Alexa settings. And yet there it is…another yellow ring.

> Alexa for telling me that I have some notification before starting my timer

  Device > Settings > Sounds > Notification > none

"Do Not Disturb" will suppress notifications without affecting alarms and timers.

I'm an Android user and have never owned an iPhone, but that sounds to me like you're talking about a push notification setting that is completely separate from an Alexa response setting. I could be wrong, but my guess is that that's why you're getting downvoted.

Thanks for posting that possible misinterpretation :)

Everything in my post was Alexa-specific. Someone who has the stated problem can follow that precise and non-obvious menu tree within the Alexa app, and it will solve their problem. It's a device-specific setting, so can be done on the kitchen Alexa without affecting other units.

Both "notification" [1] and "Do Not Disturb" [2] in my post were Alexa-specific terms that are unrelated to their mobile phone brethren.

  [1] https://storables.com/home-appliances/home-automation-appliances/how-to-turn-off-notification-on-alexa/
  [2] https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-use-alexa-do-not-disturb-mode-4788343

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