Comment by radlad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by radlad | Hacker News Reader

Siri came out in October 2011. Amazon Alexa made its debut in November 2014. Google Assistant's voice-activated speakers were released in May 2016.

From what I can tell, Siri is still a dumpster fire that nobody is willing to use. And I have no personal experience with Alexa, so I can't speak to it. But I do have a few Google Home speakers and an Android phone, and I have seen no major improvements in years. In fact, it has gotten worse - for example, you can no longer add items directly to AnyList[0], only Google Keep.

Or, as an incredibly simple example of something I thought we'd get a long time ago, it's still unable to interpret two-part requests, e.g. "please repeat that but louder," or "please turn off the kitchen and dining room lights."

I find voice assistants very useful - especially when driving, lying in bed, cooking, or when I'm otherwise preoccupied. Yet they have stagnated almost since their debut. I can only imagine nobody has found a viable way to monetize them.

What will it take to get a better voice assistant for consumers? Willow[1] doesn't seem to have taken off.

[0] https://help.anylist.com/articles/google-assistant-overview/

[1] https://heywillow.io/

edit: I realize I hijacked your thread to dump something that's been on my mind lately. Pipecat looks really cool, and I hope it takes off! I hope to get some time to experiment this weekend.

I primarily use Google Home, but I do also have Echo Frames so I use Alexa semi-regularly. My use case is primarily home automation. In that scenario, I find Alexa to be much more responsive than Google Home. I do agree that it seems like Google Home has gotten worse in a number of ways. (As a happy AnyList user, that specific one was frustrating.)

For some activities, Siri is just fine. Thinks like “send a text to x” and “remind me to do x when I get home”.

And it does fine with no internet access.

Except dictation. Much better with internet access than without.

Those are about as basic of an action as you can get. Every assistant supports them. But as soon as you want to know something like "how many teaspoons in a cup," can Siri still handle it? What about "where is the aurora borealis visible tonight"?

Another issue Siri used to struggle was trying to play specific music on Spotify. Is that better these days?

I asked, it said 48 teaspoons.

I asked to play a song my an artist on Spotify and it did it. Popped up in the Dynamic Island.

Honestly, I didn’t know it could do that!

(It did ask permission to access Spotify data first, but only that first time).

It feels like there's a qualitative jump that voice assistants need to make which they wouldn't have been capable of before the last 18 months, and as a result, yes, the products themselves have stagnated. But if you were Amazon, at what point in the last year (say) would you have picked to draw a line in the sand and build a product iteration based on that level of tech?

> From what I can tell, Siri is still a dumpster fire that nobody is willing to use. I have no personal experience with Alexa, so I can't speak to it

I use both (albeit more Alexa than Siri, both just for a really limited functionality set), and FWIW, I believe Alexa is worse than Siri. It can do two things at the same time though (just as your example: "turn on X and turn off Y", "turn on X for Y seconds", and things like that).

I also feel that it has gotten worse over the years. I read about the possibility of microphones getting dust and therefore capturing worse audio, so I got a dust blower (for other reasons, too), but it didn't solve anything.

After listening in the app what Alexa picks up (from an Echo and Echo Dot, both 4th. Gen), I have to say that they use really shitty microphones. Furthermore, I have been testing Whisper extensively last month, with audio coming from low-quality sources, and I think a similar model would interpret a lot better my voice than whatever Amazon is using.

I have Alexa (Amazon Echo Show) and my use-case is asking for a news briefing, the weather, playing music, or setting timers.

Alexa is a dumpster fire and constantly getting dumber. She also completely disrespects your settings and will re-enable settings you have disabled. She constantly ignores my questions to ask me if I want to try some other new feature instead. She randomly decides to add news stations I have explicitly removed from my Flash Briefing list.

I am constantly baffled by how bad it is.

The hardware is nice though. Wish we could run open source assistants on it.

> What will it take to get a better voice assistant for consumers?

Give it eyes?

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

> it's still unable to interpret two-part requests

Our car has Google Assistant, and yeah that's annoying. Want to turn off steering wheel heater and seat heater? Gotta do two individual requests.

That said, it's actually quite nice to have voice control over these things. Especially when it's heavy traffic and snowing on top of the icy road, and you really want to have eyes on the traffic and both hands on the steering wheel.

> That said, it's actually quite nice to have voice control over these things.

Yes! I really think voice assistants are underrated. When I talk to iOS users, they have a much less favorable opinion of Siri (and I've watched my partner give up on using it over the past 10 years) and given that iOS has dominant market share in the US, I suspect this is a part of it.

But I also think there is just so much "low hanging fruit" that would drastically improve the experience. But I remember that even during "the race" for voice AI, everyone was wondering... how will they monetize this? And I'm not sure anyone was ever truly able to figure that out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com