This never seems to be a popular opinion on hn, but this is the ultimate Rube Goldberg machine: A complex ai built by a billion dollar company, an enormous amount of man hours, only so that switching a light switch because slower, and less deterministic. I'm certainly not suggesting that there are no valid uses for ML/AI, but digital assistants seem to be an enormous waste.
I'm a fan of Google Assistant's usefulness and I generally agree with this. The Assistant craze seems more justified when you consider that companies like Google and Amazon are using it as a way to build datasets. It's a strategic reserve of data to build other things from (i.e. Google Duplex) and it doesn't matter at their scale if there isn't a vision yet, if a competitor is stockpiling transcribable voice data, they need to keep up.
Ignoring the fact that the research isn't only used one for one purpose, a proper assistant is hugely valuable to me.
Simple things like:
"Remind me to X tomorrow at 9am"
"Add Y to the shopping list"
"Remind me to do Z when I get home"
This is the only way I do reminders now and it's great. It's especially useful while driving, or when I'm in bed nearly asleep and remember something, I can just tell Siri without having to get up and use my phone.
And as far as smart home controls, being able to say "Siri, turn all the lights on" or "Siri, turn the heater on" without having to stop what I'm doing and walk around the house flicking switches is really nice.
Assistants provide a very noticeable QoL improvement for me in many aspects. I think that's more than most other products on the market can say. And that's not even touching on the lives saved from not having to use your phone while driving.
Yes but... Siri is (to me) not there yet. Promising but not there.
Siri is unaware of so many things.
A simple command that would actually be useful (but fails totally):
« Siri, remind me to buy milk the next time I go get groceries. »
And even then... I should not have to mention the part about « groceries ». The request should be perfectly understood with a full stop after the word « milk » and a reminder should pop up automatically whenever I am in a grocery (any grocery).
An even better Siri would also be able to a categorize things properly. For example, if later in the day I say « Siri, I will need chicken, butter, salt and cardamom for my next recipe », Siri should automatically add those to the « milk » next time I go to the grocery.
Anyone know why there is no longer a way to turn off all the suggestions on Alexa anymore?
I've used Alexa since it came out and they've added annoying random suggestions over the years that you were able to turn off in various settings menus.
But in the past year or Alexa has been upselling me stuff or randomly telling me about features I don't want to hear about when I'm just trying to turn on a light. And it seems like there's now actually no way to turn this stuff off.
Does anyone know if you can turn off Alexa upselling or is it going to just be a part of having a smart home forever?
I'm still not very impressed by this, as it can be totally accomplished by a pad of paper and a pen.
I'm believe the most valid use of AI/ML is to perform tasks that people either cannot currently do, or cannot easily do. For example, ai-based up-scaling of old video game pre-renders. It's not really feasible for a person to do this well, unless you simply rebuild everything with a team of artists. And you could argue that up-scaling images for a video game is trivial, since all video games are trivial. But, the point is that the task at hand requires the help of a computer, whereas a to-do list, or using a light switch does not.
I gotta ask, can one not just use their memory and remember to write those things down in a few minutes/the morning? I know that kinda defeats the purpose of a notebook. But, like, remembering to write down to get more garlic should not be difficult in any way. Also, if one is so perturbed at forgetting things then some other questions and areas need to be explored. If one is having difficulty remembering things this much, I fear that there are much deeper issues and possibly some quite serious health problems at play.
1. There's nothing wrong with keeping that same notebook by your bed. Also, you might wake your spouse up by talking to Google.
2. Don't get so messy when cooking, also it hardly matters if your temporary notebook gets a bit dirty.
3. Don't multitask when driving. Taking your eyes off the road is the main concern, but testing has shown driver's voice control systems to be distracting to a significant degree. And, voice assistants are at least somewhat similar.
> tasks that people either cannot currently do, or cannot easily do.
A todo entry or flipping lights via assistants also qualify as such tasks, if we broaden the definition of "easy". The flow from having the thought of an idea or a song to making a note or playing the song by just speaking out loud is just so convenient, without having to context switch from whatever one is doing. Controlling a set of IoT devices with custom commands is another good usecase.
Of course, not everyone has a workflow where a digital assistant fits well today. However, I expect that their usefulness will increase exponentially with time. We're surely heading to the sci-fi future where each house will have a personalized digital guardian responding to the wishes of the family, Jarvis style, no?
Speech recognition goes way beyond digital assistants. Plain old transcription is super useful, especially in terms of accessibility. I was voice coding for a while because of RSI and even as immature as the tech is, it saved my ass.
I tried a few. Caster and talon were the best. I’d recommend talon with dragon as it’s speech engine, but apparently talon has a new built in speech engine which people like, so maybe try that engine first to save money.
I'm not a full data point to work from, but I've got neuropathy and nerve damage. Side effects include severe short term memory problems (I can forget some things as quickly as 10 seconds, as frustrating as that is..) and sometimes motor control issues.
For me, speech recognition and assistants, along with software like Todoist, are able to keep me far more functional than I would be otherwise.
It seems that with AI/ML, choosing/defining your problem well is hugely important. Text to speech, even computer generated natural language is a definite enough task that engineers (and machines) have the feedback to make progress.
