Hacker News Reader

Comment by QuercusMax | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't help that Google also keeps breaking everything with the home voice assistants, and this has been true for ages and ages.

I only have a single internet-enabled light in my house (that I got for free), and 90% of the time when I ask the Assistant to turn on the light, it says "Which one?". Then I tell it "the only one that exists in my house", and it says "OK" and turns it on.

Getting it to actually play the right song is on the right set of speakers is also nearly impossible, but I can do it no problem with the UI on my phone.

I don't fear a future where computers can do every task better than us: I fear a future where we have brain-damaged robots annoy the hell out of me because someone was too lazy to do anything besides throw an LLM at things.

View on HN

> I don't fear a future where computers can do every task better than us: I fear a future where we have brain-damaged robots annoy the hell out of me because someone was too lazy to do anything besides throw an LLM at things.

THIS!

Rename the name of the light to "the".

I'm positive Google's voice commands worked better when Google Home initially released. No idea why it has gotten so bad. Recognition seemed better when it was internal and called "Majel" though on that one I'm sure that's just rose tinted glasses.

It's weird because Gemini is so impressive multimodally but even the Gemini powered assistant can't figure out which lights to turn out, telling the TV to "play" doesn't mean turning it on (it means unpausing it!), just an incredibly frustrating experience.

I had an annoying few weeks where, after years of working properly, Google assistant started misinterpreting "navigate home" as "navigate to the nearest Home Depot™".

not really limited to their AI products; Android just sometimes randomly decides that pressing play on BT receiver in my car should totally start playing the song directly from my phone instead of the BT it connected to

"Alexa Play SpongeBob on youtube" is met with a sabrina carpenter hit every time. no idea why

Alternative it is hit with

"Would you like Spongebob, Spongebob Sponge on the Run, the spongebob squarepants movie, or Bob Espanja Pantalones Cuadrados

I really wonder if Google has any reasonable QA people still working on this stuff.

in the “AI age” QA is automated :)

IMO the root cause has more to do with vendor lock-in, near monopolies, freemium/advertising models, etc.

The desperate wish to believe that AI is a silver bullet is fuel on a fire that was already going.

QA is the spouses of engineers. Management is a revolving door of the "smartest people" who are thinking about what to eat or their next job. Voices of reason get lost in the noise.

> QA is the spouses of engineers

I'm starting to doubt they use their own product at home.

I'm a Google engineer. I often don't even recommend our products.

I suspect most engineers at most companies, working behind the scenes to see the sausage being made, grow reservations about recommending it afterwards.

I say it as a matter of having eaten other sausages as well and discussing the various sausages with my peers (if I may extend the analogy).

Siri decided "home" was some random place several miles from me that. Couldn't get it fixed other than by changing phones.

At least you didn't have to move...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com