151–160 of 296 posts
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Just say "dictated but not read" at the end and leave all the mistakes in there. Problem solved.
I expect you're joking, but in case you're not I would consider that very rude in almost any situation. I don't always catch all of my mistakes, but I definitely read over and check for them.
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I can definitely say that for food I MUCH prefer the web/app interface. I can swipe through a bunch of nice-looking food and just tap on something that looks appetizing. You can't get that with voice no matter how you do it. It's like if a restaurant had no menu and the wait staff just recited the menu in your face and asked you to pick. Even with real humans, voice isn't the best interface for presenting food choice…
> if a restaurant had no menu and the wait staff just recited the menu That's exactly how food is presented to you at lots of high-end restaurants. Once you get above the fast-casual tier, menus never have pictures. If you know a lot about food and you trust the chef, voice is a perfect medium for explaining the choices. Pictures are just a discovery aid.
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Which is exactly why I prefer formal query languages over NLP queries. In both cases (at least with most state of the art NLP techniques), you have to learn certain patterns and ways to phrase a query so that the system will reliably understand it. With formal query languages, these patterns are well-defined, can be looked up and will most likely not change significantly (so there is value in memorizing them). With N…
> Which is exactly why I prefer formal query languages over NLP queries. People like to reference Star Trek for stuff like NLP queries, but if you go back to TNG and pay close attention to the verbal queries to the computer, much of the time it isn't natural language. They seem to actually use some sort of formal query language that fits English a bit closer, but is still distinct from when the characters speak to ea…
"Computer, begin auto-destruct sequence, authorization Picard 4-7 Alpha Tango."
- Wake word. Command. Authorization stanza. (I bet the computer would prompt for authorization if missing.)
"Computer, Commander Beverly Crusher. Confirm auto-destruct sequence, authorization Crusher 2-2 Beta Charlie."
- Wake word (possibly superfluous). Identification stanza (probably superfluous for the usual crew, but I can see from an HCI perspective that you might want to make people provide it specifically for such a consequential protocol, and it may also be of merit if some random admiral usually halfway across the galaxy pops in to confirm). Command confirmation, authorization stanza.
"This is Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Destruct sequence Alpha-One. Fifteen minutes, silent countdown. Enable."
- Computer is very awake at this point, no wake word. Identification stanza. Sequence parameter. Time parameter. Verbosity parameter. Commit.
A big problem with the assistants is that as soon as they fail at a query they seem stupid, I feel stupid, and I stop using them for a long time. Last weekend I had the following failed queries: "OK Google, what is the air quality like at Mt. Shasta today?" "OK Google, add a waypoint for the last gas station before the mountain pass" "OK Google, what percentage of people can you detect to be wearing masks on recent I…
As soon as you see them for what they are it makes perfect sense. They're basically a proxy to google search with extra dumb features on top. Every single feature that isn't google search has been hard coded (map directions, setup alarms, &c.), as soon as you get out of the hard coded cases it's blatantly obvious these things are anything but "smart" imho they're just used to give google/amazon a few more data points…
One thing I haven't seen discussed is the poor affordance / discoverability of speech technology. Google Home can do some clever things however, it also does not have the ability to do some very basic stuff. As a user, how do you know what Google Home can do and cannot do? It is just trial and error. And if Google Home introduces a new feature to be able to complete new types of queries. What now? How does a user kno…
Amazon's workaround for this problem is to have it tell you when new "options" are available for a command (ie: if you set an alarm it would confirm setting the alarm then tell you it can wake you up to the sound of birds then it provides an example command) and Amazon sends out a "what's new with Alexa" email every so often that's 90% example commands.
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> There's a reason that people use apps to get food delivery rather than calling. Well, if I had some type of personal assistant who worked for me (as in, a real human), I would just call out "Hey, Sam, please order pizza for me" and continue with whatever I was doing. The reason people don't make phone calls is they add a lot of additional friction. You have to dial the number, and wait for someone to pick up, and g…
Pizza is a weird example because pizza joint menus are more-or-less standard and unsurprising. For any non-pizza restaurant I'll want to start by scanning a menu, which is way more efficient than listening to a menu be read to me.
However, if you frequently order the same thing from a given restaurant, having a way to order "the usual" from that place via voice might be convenient. But I'm not sure it's much more convenient than being able to do the same thing with a button click or something.
For me, the thing that killed voice commands had nothing to do with speech technology. It was latency and error handling. At the start of my morning commute, I would say, "Ok Google, navigate to work". Often, this would fail because I was in the network limbo area outside my house, where my phone struggles to transition from home WiFi to data. Worst of all: The failure would be horribly slow. I would have to drive fo…
A big problem with the assistants is that as soon as they fail at a query they seem stupid, I feel stupid, and I stop using them for a long time. Last weekend I had the following failed queries: "OK Google, what is the air quality like at Mt. Shasta today?" "OK Google, add a waypoint for the last gas station before the mountain pass" "OK Google, what percentage of people can you detect to be wearing masks on recent I…
Actually, ability to delete all iPhone alarms at once via Siri is a life saver. I know no other way to bulk delete l/disable alarms in iOS.
A big problem with the assistants is that as soon as they fail at a query they seem stupid, I feel stupid, and I stop using them for a long time. Last weekend I had the following failed queries: "OK Google, what is the air quality like at Mt. Shasta today?" "OK Google, add a waypoint for the last gas station before the mountain pass" "OK Google, what percentage of people can you detect to be wearing masks on recent I…
We're humans - we can deal with ambiguity. Systems should trust that we'll respect them more if they tell us they're unsure, rather than either jumping to the wrong conclusion or simply being unwilling to guess!