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25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer

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Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer

#161

Post by PeterisP »

wheybags wrote: post #157
frankosaurus wrote: post #144

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…

Why would you need directions to the workplace you go to every day? Unless you're doing onsite stuff in new places every day?

Not the OP, but many people use Waze etc for driving directions on everyday commute because the same destination does not imply the same route - due to construction, accidents, traffic jams, etc the best route can vary significantly, and simply driving the same route as yesterday can take much more time than it did yesterday.

Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer

#162

Post by ineedasername »

dheera wrote: post #5

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…

On your searches:

1) I get the correct response; Assistant first asks me if I want to use "air check", I say yes, and get the correct response.

2) I get appropriate responses when I ask "What is the closest gas station to Mt. Shasta." Because the approaches are mostly from Rt. 5, you'll have no problem getting a usable response. Another approach from Rt 89 exists, so I don't know how you expect Google to know which "mountain pass" you mean. However, should you ask Google "What is the closest gas station to Mt Shasta on Rt 89", you will get an appropriate response. Should you be approaching from the opposite side of the mountain, unlikely though that is, Rt 5 or Rt 89 would still be the closest

3) I don't know why you expect a computer to answer this question well at all. I'm not aware of an API that would track this sort of thing. Google doing this itself, at scale, for any popular destination would be a very large project in ML with a very high error rate: Instagram photos are unlikely to be representative of a whole, the data set for a given location may be sparse, and especially for an outside location it is entirely likely (as I did at a local pumpkin farm) that people at an outside tourist destination will move away from a crowd, remove their mask, and take a nice photo safely, while people in close proximation still adhere to appropriate social distancing. Effective use would also need to be real-time: from day-to-day a given location could attract people that wear masks, and the next day a large group does not, especially in the > 300 square mile area you specified. It is not reasonable to expect this question to be meaningfully answered by either a human or a computer.

Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer

#163

Post by pjc50 »

lqet wrote: post #20
dheera wrote: post #5

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…

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…

It may be easier to train the humans to be precise. This is the solution adopted by armies which need unambiguous communication over noisy radio.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_order

Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer

#164

Post by macjohnmcc »

dheera wrote: post #5

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…

Heck I ask Siri something like what is the pollen count and I get back a page that it can't read describing what a pollen count is not what the current measured pollen count is in my area. If it could answer your questions I would have home for my own question getting the expected results.

Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer

#165

Post by cameldrv »

crazygringo wrote: post #111

For most short interactions, the mouse/trackpad/finger is simply faster. Now for long-form typing, I'd love to use dictation and sometimes do for taking down short thoughts I e-mail myself from my iPhone. But the problem is not just that it still makes tons of mistakes. (Probably a quarter of my notes-to-self involve errors so big it's even impossible for me to later figure out what I even meant by trying to sound it…

100% this. Dragon used to have more correction features, but at least the Apple dictation doesn't really have any. Even just "correct sentence" where I try again with the same sentence would be a huge improvement.

Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer

#167

Post by tschwimmer »

dheera wrote: post #5

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…

FWIW, I tried the first query on Google Home and it suggested I talk to a third party extension called "Air Check." I didn't go through with connecting it but I assume it would give you what you wanted. It sounds like you were on mobile so maybe it's different there. I actually appreciate it prompting to connect before making the request because there's probably some privacy tradeoff there.

The second query was hard for me to test but it seems like a reasonable one to make.

The third one is probably impossible due to Instagram's TOS (among other things.) Their TOS states: "You must not crawl, scrape, or otherwise cache any content from Instagram including but not limited to user profiles and photos." [0] After Cambridge Analytica I'm not surprised that this is the case. Even if Instagram allowed scraping of their data, this feels like a somewhat specialized (though currently very relevant) request. I tried reformulating this request as "What is the mask compliance rate in Shasta county?" which also didn't turn up results, but I'm not surprised by that either. I suspect that data doesn't exist anywhere, so it's hard to fault the assistant for not pulling it up.

[0] https://www.instagram.com/about/legal/terms/before-january-1....

Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer

#168

Post by makecheck »

Three major problems I see:

1. When these systems go offline, they’re nearly useless. One WiFi glitch and the system gives me the audio equivalent of a blank stare. This directly reduces the chance I’ll casually use voice and instead prefer my more-reliable phone.

2. Most systems haven’t figured out reasonable responses and are basically chatty and full of sounds. Make it Unix-like (silence on success = golden)!!! If I say “turn on the light” and you turn it on, I CAN SEE THE LIGHT ON so I don’t also need to hear a loud chime and some voice confirmation like “sure, no problem”! The fact that I can silently do things quickly in other ways (e.g. phone) is another strike against voice. Yet this is something they could easily fix.

3. Voice systems are not 100% perfect at comprehension yet they tend to babble out long responses. This puts me in the situation of trying to shut them up for long enough to listen for my intended query. Maybe they can improve this by erring on the side of fewer words in replies, with more pauses? Not sure.

Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer

#169

Post by tschwimmer »

jjoonathan wrote: post #154
lm28469 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, and that wouldn't be a problem if the discovery story wasn't dismal or the browsing story wasn't dismal, but it definitely is. On both counts.

Discovery and browsing are not good on the assistant interface but I'd argue that's a constraint of voice vs visual. On a desktop/mobile, the screen holds the state so you can go back to previous entries, etc. Over voice, you mind holds the state which scales much much worse.

Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer

#170

Post by ryankrage77 »

A few years ago when Microsoft was pushing Cortana with Windows 10, I decided that since I was wearing a headset at my desk 90% of the time anyway, I may as well try using a voice assistant so I could multi-task. So next time I needed to do a calculation in the middle of something, I said "hey cortana, what's 50 times 12.5?" while typing something up... and it opened the start menu, lost focus on my window, and the searched for it on Bing in Edge. I just wanted it to read me the answer.
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