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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

>One issue is ensuring the device only chimes in when useful, preventing it from talking too much or not knowing when to finish the conversation—an ongoing issue with ChatGPT.

This device that just sits and listens all the time and interrupts ... that's nothing like I use LLMs now. That's a completely different mode of operation / my tolerance for mistakes would be near 0 with that.

It's not clear to me if an LLM can even DO these things conversationally well enough to work / not be a nuisance.

Siri might be the best example, you use it a few times, it's useless a few times and then I just use it to set timers and forget about it otherwise.

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> and then I just use it to set timers and forget about it otherwise.

Much as the Apple Watch, in practice, was really a good fitness tracker, and kinda pointless for everything else, the natural place for voice assistant gadgets is setting timers. I'm fairly sure that's all that 99% of Alexa users use their talking cylinder for, say.

Also, isn't this just that Humane.ai gadget? And there was another one, IIRC. They were all the rage as CES 2024 IIRC.

Just imagine the unlimited utility of your device pinging at random points throughout the day to declare "Ah, this is a classic problem with <SUBJECT>" who wouldn't need that?

See, this is the sort of thing that makes me suspect that maybe I'm in hell (in the Good Place or Iain Banks' Surface Detail mode rather than the devils-poking-people-with-pitchforks one); that, as a concept, could only possibly exist to torture people.

It sounds like this device could become the iPod Shuffle of AI devices— cute and clever, but not particularly useful.

I still can't understand my my HomePod is constantly responding (uselessly, often just saying it can't send a message for me) when I am talking to my phone that is in my hand. It even happens when I have AirPods in my ears. How hard is it to have a priority listing for:

1: AirPods-linked devices go first when AirPods are present

2: closest device goes first in general

3: if there are multiple devices that could respond, and only some of them can do the requested task, one of the devices that can do the task should respond

I had the same problem but in reverse. I’d want to play a song on the HomePod but my iPad sitting on the coffee table would start playing it on its tinny little speaker. The solution was to set Siri on the devices to not respond to “Siri”. To use Siri on the handheld devices I press and hold the side button until I get the ugly gradient border. It’s pretty bad that Apple released this feature in such a uselessly broken state.

Ditto. I tell my Apple Watch to set an alarm and my HomePod — in another room, 30 feet away — says "I've set your alarm." FAIL

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