181–190 of 533 posts
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Had the same experience at a friends house trying to get Alexa to play Bach. I gave up after a half dozen attempts. These products are just hilariously bad.
Names are a hard problem though. How would it know how "Bach" is pronounced? It seems you would need pretty advanced multimodal AI, some sort of GPT which is trained both on text and audio.
FWIW I tried many alternatives like "Bach classical music" etc to no avail.
The claim that somehow LLMs as they stand are somehow the answer is disturbing. ChatGPTs ability to be authoritatively wrong is a serious problem… Just to see what it would do, I gave it a basic word problem the other day (two people drive towards each other) and it had the steps right, but buried in it was a simple logic error (it claimed that the two parties traveling at different speeds would travel the same dista…
I think the point people are making is that GPT models are getting better at an exciting/disturbing pace depending on one's point of view, while Siri has been around for years and has only gotten worse.
At least Siri doesn't pester you to buy various things or to use it for additional purposes like Alexa does as far as I know. But, yeah, all the voice assistants are pretty bad or at least bad enough that I mostly give up trying to use them for anything other than certain rote tasks. Siri may or may not be marginally worse but none of them are good enough to, say, really use hands-off in a car unless I've carefully p…
I just cannot tolerate Alexa talking back to me, especially when I'm trying to do something important. I've lost my train of thought too many times because of Alexa.
I think I might be in the minority based on other comments here. I hate things like Siri and whatever Android phones have. It's incredibly rude every time I hear someone almost yelling into their phone in public. They get frustrated Siri doesn't work and loudly and slowly say whatever it is again like being mean to a dumb child. People speak out entire text messages and the replies. I'm not pointing out folks with di…
> I'm not pointing out folks with disabilities. I'm talking about perfectly healthy adults who seem to have no sense of awareness around them. Careful. It's easy to overlook disabilities that may not be immediately externally visible. I have a friend who's heavily dyslexic. You'd never know it if you ran into her on the street; she's quite successful in her career. Yet she uses voice dictation when sending text messa…
I'm referencing people who also think it's fine to loudly play music or have entire conversations with the phone speaker on in public.
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Seems like it does - cool! - but why does it sometimes spin for several seconds when faced with a seemingly simple request? I'm guessing it has some path where it tries to use the network if possible, but if the network is spotty then the requests timeout and it reports a failure?
It probably takes more time to run the analysis locally on a phone chip.
I have a very low tolerance for error in things like setting timers, playing music, getting weather, calling someone. This is because I can complete these tasks simply, quickly, and with 100% reliability by hand. The marginal improvements allowed by tools like Siri aren't worth it to me if there is any decrease in reliability.
I'm sure there are use cases I'm not considering, but I've also seen perfectly able-bodied folks shout "call Steve" into their phone for 40 seconds longer than it would have taken to navigate manually. Conceptually, the idea of stacking even more engineering onto these tools to get these tasks working reliably is funny.
Siri, don't make me even start. I like much of what Apple does, but Siri is just hilariously bad. The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years. Keywords are randomly being changed, sometimes they fire, a day later you have to use a different phrase to get what you want. They even broke "Where am I" at least in German. "Wo bin ich" is sometimes replied to with "Sein oder nicht sein" (to be…
I just set timers using the crown on my watch now, combined with custom google assistant commands to control what I need (lights, tv) through my Nest. Playing and controlling music is too much of an extreme sport for my taste on either assistant, and I've stopped using it for calls too as there's always a 5% chance it will call up some random person I knew decades ago but haven't removed from my contact list because reasons. The name is of course totally different from the few persons I do call on a regular basis.
It's great for joking around with my kid though, laughing at the misinterpretations and stuff like that. And that's about it.
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Make a routine with these commands. It has to run daily because those cowards at amazon aren't quite ready to let us off the upsell leash. 1. Set volume to 0 2. "Turn off by the way" 3. Set volume back to your preferred. I wonder what the conversion on 'by the way' is. Like how many BTWs have played and how many customers have taken alexa up on that offer?
"By the way" is alexa's entire business model. They sell these devices at a loss and don't require a subscription for the nlp so they can "by the way" you into buying random shit. I'm surprised they let you mute it at all, especially after devices lost $10 billion last year.
Maybe it's the emerging neo-Luddite in me, but I'm alarmed at how many people begrudgingly continue to use these tools (accessibility reasons notwithstanding, which is an admittedly major caveat). I have a very low tolerance for error in things like setting timers, playing music, getting weather, calling someone. This is because I can complete these tasks simply, quickly, and with 100% reliability by hand. The margin…
For all Google's faults, the Google assistant is years ahead of Siri and Alexa at natural language comprehension. It's not perfect, but it clears my bar, and it comes in handy a few times per day.