don't get me wrong, it is silly, but also being able to set a timer without touching anything with your gross cooking hands is unironically a wonderful feature.
An entire product segment for when your hands are dirty...
You mess up a single conversion and your finished baked goods go straight in the trash.
Weight to volume conversions are rare here but sure I do those on the fly so I guess it makes sense, do you really do you guys really do it that often? If you do extensive conversions of recipes you will need to get the ratios correct as well it is just not something I see myself doing with a voice assistant.
What do you mean it has never worked? What do you ask your assistant, and what does it respond?
> Seems like pretty hard things to do on the fly with recipes.
What's hard? I don't understand. If you need a quantity in unit x, but you only have a measuring cup or spoon in unit y, then you ask for the conversion and then you measure out that amount in unit y.
I genuinely don't understand the difficulties you seem to be encountering.
> do you really do you guys really do it that often?
Yes, literally all the time.
As things stand, I walk over to the conversion chart hanging on the fridge.
I memorize because of diabetes. You need to know how much sugar you eat so you do volume -> weight * carbs/weight * portion size to calculate how much insulin you are supposed to give for a meal. That is not because of cooking and having tried doing that with voice assistant several times I know it is hard to get correct numbers.
The only thing I'm reasonably sure of is that there are four quarts in a gallon - and yet, I would only bet $10 on that, not $20.
And since that stuff isn't metric, orders-of-magnitude conversions (e.g. scaling a recipe up/down) become needlessly more complex as well.
American or old British recipes; ours are all metric now.
The exception is perhaps teaspoons/tablespoons, but those are trivial metric values (5ml and 15ml), so easy enough to scale and convert if you don't have the right measuring spoon handy.
that said, considering how much we rely on alexa for timers and spotify, what I really want is a homepod for the sound quality (if apple and Spotify would just start playing nice), privacy (yes, in a world with a lack of privacy I actually believe apple is basically our best bet given the ecosystem choices) and mostly for the potential of apple intelligence, which, if it worked as well as chatgpt today in "conversing" with you I'd be over the moon about.
does anyone else primarily interact w chatgpt via voice? it really does seem incredible how you can start with a superficial question about a topic and then keep digging down. it's replaced a lot of my information-seeking google searches, which I have never used voice with, with a voice app that I would use endlessly if I didn't have to open the chatgpt app and tap on the microphone button (that may seem crazy, but think of all the time you spend away from your phone, or like others are saying, with something in your hands, where you voice is the ui).
p.s. can't leave this comment without saying that, yes, I worry about the privacy implications of all of this stuff daily, but guess I'm dumb enough that I still use all of these privacy-invading devices
... except, my Sonos Roam responded, and started playing. Not my stereo pair of era 100s on my desk. Let alone all the speakers in my house.
tried again. "I didn't find anything called "office speakers" in your music library". To be fair, she suggested setting up multi-room in the alexa app, which I suppose I could do.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this Apple AI leap will bring us a less stupid Homepod Mini so I can throw away my Alexas. It's almost 4 years old with zero refreshes, still running on the S5 chip from Apple Watch 5.
The only things we use our Alexas are pretty much: turn on/off lights in the room it's in, ask for the weather and timers. Homepods can do the first two, but the timers are pretty useless unless one is enough.
Mainly I just use them as alarms, timers, a talking clock and for listening to radio. I occasionally ask it what time a local shop may close or similar.
For the little money I've spent on them I'm perfectly happy using them in such a superficial manner, they make life a little tiny bit easier and that's ok.
For all these purposes it is great not to get a phone out, and the speaker is far better than my phone speaker for sound.
But yeah, I think a lot of Alexa's get used mainly for kitchen timers!
I cook a lot and totally get this feeling, but honestly your cooking hands probably aren't gross. And if they are you're probably doing something wrong, in which case some cooking classes will be both very enjoyable and eliminate the problem.