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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

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™".

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"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...

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

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