Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

matthewkaras.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 296 posts

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

#171

Post by ufmace »

codeulike wrote: post #29
Swizec wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Alexa, play punk rock” “Playing ” “Alexa stop. Alexa play punk rock playlist” “Cannot find punk rock playlist” “Alexa play punk rock 00’s playlist” “Can’t find” “Alexa play early 2000’s punk rock” “Playing punk rock 00’s playlist” It’s like she’s trying to mock me.

Burglar: "Put your hands up and show me where the money is, I won't hurt you..." Me: "Alright man, I'll tell you where is money ... ALEXA CALL THE POLICE!" Alexa: "Shuffling songs by The Police" * EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE plays as I get punched 24 times * from https://twitter.com/ppathole/status/1092034892249079813

Jokes aside, the police probably want to know whether your complaint is that there is a burglar holding you at gunpoint, or that you're trying to order a pizza. They probably get both types of calls at about the same frequency.

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

#172

Post by shpx »

mikestew wrote: post #143
nottorp wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch. I just did a quickie test asking Siri to set me a reminder for 'tomorrow at eighteen'. No dice. It set it for 8 am. It doesn't even support 24 hour time - at least in English.

"...set an alarm for tomorrow @ eighteen hundred." works just fine. At least in U. S. English, I don't think I've ever heard anyone refer to 6 p. m. as "eighteen".

but you would still understand them if they did or take 5 seconds to ask a clarifying question.

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

#173

Post by acchow »

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…

> It turns out that the current generation of "assistants" are mostly just template-matchers which really doesn't help me much at all.

All the cases you've indicated as "so simple" are only so simple as template matching.

When generalized, they are hard problems.

Sure, you could have humans sketch out a few thousand templates enabling "Ok Google" to support such simple things like "What is the air quality at " which looks up from an API. But that doesn't generalize "for free" outside of your templates.

Google seems to want to avoid handcrafted templates and go straight for the generalized solution.

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

#175

Post by toast0 »

ryandrake wrote: post #150
PeterisP wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GUIs won over console workflows because GUIs have better discoverability and the "recall vs recognize" difference; it's mentally much easier to recognize the option you want when presented it than to recall the existence or the naming of that option. In those aspects of UX, voice interfaces have the same drawbacks as console apps when compared to a good GUI. Also, they have to work within the "bandwidth bottleneck" o…

> Also, they have to work within the "bandwidth bottleneck" of audio - just imagine a phone system that tells you all the options you have, "Press 1 for something, Press 2 for another thing..." - they are so annoying because they are slow and inherently linear They're even slower now because the brain trust decided adding voice control to the phone menu system was a great idea. So before, it said "For prescription re…

> I can just as easily press 1 as I can say a word, and when I press 1, there is a near 100% chance that the computer on the other end will understand my command.

So, I would rarely say something when I could push a button, but when using a smartphone on a call, it's not always easy or obvious how to push a button. Some people may have mobility issues making it hard to push a button, or be on speaker phone far away from the buttons. Or, maybe they haven't updated their telephone equipment in 50 years, and only have a rotary dial. Or, maybe on a terrible VoIP system that can't manage to get the tones through.

There's probably some way to clean up the script.

"(Please listen carefully, as our options have changed.) Please choose from the following options: Say prescription refills or press 1; say insurance denied or press 2; say referral to veterinary care or press 3"

I could get behind voice interfaces for more things if the commands words were documented, clear, and consistent, and the damn things worked. Until then, buttons seem good to me.

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

#176

Post by visarga »

thewarrior wrote: post #120
iandanforth wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this is HN, I want to say that I think the above is now doable and more people should be working on startups in this space. The thing we're discovering is how to marry NLP (which works pretty well) with structured databases and automated tools (which work really really well). A pure AI play probably won't get this done. But if your AI starts knowing how to use information tools then I think we'll see a lot of…

Sounds fascinating. Could you share any pointers to papers , academic work on this subject ?

Data Agnostic RoBERTa based Natural Language to SQL Query Generation

https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.05243v1

more

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2020&q=text-to-sql...

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

#177

Post by sp332 »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #89

I always thought it was a bit dumb for Google to name their voice assistant 'Google'. First you cannot ever upgrade the name, its THE name. Second, every time the assistant screws up, Google gets the blame directly tied to their name.

It's been a while, but I was able to get Google to recognize a different phrase by repeating it several times during the initial training.

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

#178

Post by ryankrage77 »

ryankrage77 wrote: post #170

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 s…

Another frustrating experience with a voice assistant was with Google Assistant. I was on a train, and I didn't want to miss my stop if I got distracted (as had happened before). Since I had my headphones on, I tried getting Google assistant to notify me when I arrived at my destination. It could not do it, the devs hadn't made a template for this scenario at the time.

Nowadays it might work via a location-based reminder, but I can't trust that to work within the 15 second window I have to get off the train.

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

#179

Post by sp332 »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #7

I will consider talking to my computer when my computer is the only one that would hear me. I also never talk to my phone.

Yeah, it's weird to have a conversation with someone else listening. But I will bring it in if I'm discussing something with another person, and want to look something up. It feels more normal to have a voice interface involved when I'm already talking.

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

#180

Post by matthewdgreen »

ineedasername wrote: post #162
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 "…

I don’t believe he’s looking for a voice assistant. He’s in the market for Lieutenant Data.
Post reply on HN