Have any open-source voice assistants reached a half-usable state?
Changes we're making to Google Assistant
141–150 of 302 posts
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#142"Using your voice to send an email" - how's that not useful?! E.g. running late for a meeting and send a quick email from your car.
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#143To me this highlights the core failure with all these voice-driven UIs: you have absolutely no idea what is possible and what isn't. Discoverability is zero, which makes big changes like this even more disruptive. I've already decided that I'm done with Google's smart assistant stuff in any case. I have a Google Home with a screen in my kitchen and the most-used feature (aside from just existing as a photo frame) was…
On top of what you mentioned in your first sentence, any ideas to improve discoverability are horrible. I hate it when Alexa does not play my podcast right away but explains to me how I can change episodes. I despise Alexa for telling me that I have some notification before starting my timer. And so on - any voice only attempt to explain me something without me asking for it means adding a lot of friction between me…
Yes... when it does anything other than what I ask, it makes me feel like it's wasting my time.
Alexa recently started responding with "Good afternoon! " and it irks me more than it probably should. I've looked to see if I can turn it off and can't find the option.
I don't need pleasantries from a machine.
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
The old Google Now feed was amazing. Showed me where my car is parked. Told me when to leave to arrive places in time. Pulled up my flight details automatically. Now it's just a bunch of click bait articles.
It was fantastic. It's worth noting that Pixel's At a Glance does still tell you when to leave (and you get a notification), but as far as I can tell, the parking features are completely gone. That being said, I no longer have any clue what features exist in Google's ecosystem because their A/B and feature flag rollout system is so fundamentally broken and misused by the product teams that some features literally nev…
I have a very similar experience. When I bought an EV I wanted to turn on Google Maps' energy efficient routing feature (announced in 2021 at https://blog.google/products/maps/3-new-ways-navigate-more-s...) but the setting is simply not present. After an hour of wasted time debugging, I had to uninstall and reinstall the app to get the setting to show up.
I personally much prefer Apple's approach where generally features are identified by specific version numbers. If you have the version or newer, you have it. Certainly a bit more difficult to do capacity planning for the backend engineers but absolutely worthwhile for users.
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#145Something that's kinda funny but baffling to me is the unspoken assumption that a UI with voice input should also default to voice output. That's not how two humans work on command / response tasks, say, hanging pictures. You say, "a finger to the left and up" and I move the picture. Silent UI feedback is a curiously unplumbed idea. Or another one: if you sit at a restaurant and ask the menu, would you rather they te…
How do you get feedback then?
Supposedly, when you are voice commanding, you do so because you are unable to look at the device and visually confirm that the correct action is being undertaken.
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny fact is that this is core use case I use siri to add things to the reminders app which I have a smart list called "shopping list." It's amazing how great this is, and how many times I use this.
I second this. My two other derived commands I use every day are “remind in 2 hours to do X” or “remind me Friday at 7 to take Y”. This and “timer X minutes”. I would be very sad if these were to disappear or to stop working as well as it does now (I like that if I say “remind me tomorrow” when it’s right past midnight it asks for confirmation that I actually mean the same day since it’s “already tomorrow”)
My Google Home - Lenovo Smart Clock just says "I'll remind you today at $TIME".
The device is out of support, it has its glitches (e.g. it's still able to play and pause podcasts, but after pausing it would say "Sorry. something's gone wrong", if asking it to snooze an alarm it would say "OK, alright" and then "snoozing for 10 minutes"), looking forward (not!) to Google making a breaking change and it being e-waste soon.
Hah, in the imaginary future where we have cyborg assistants instead of climate destruction, my robot butler will pour half a cup of tea, go back to the kitchen, and then return to pour the second half of the cup, and I'll tell my guest, "Yeah, it's a 5 year old model, the startup that made him went bust so I'm using a firmware from a Ukranian forum... Джевс, можна мені трохи цукру?"
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#147I bought Google Home/speakers in 2018 and still use them.
Since I bought them, there have been almost 0 improvements that I've seen. A lot of potential gone to waste. That they're sunsetting features is not a surprise.
I don't know if Alexa is better, but I always tell my friends to buy those instead of Google Homes.
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#148Another step in Android's steady progression of become less and less useful hands-free. It's incredible to me that my experience with my Nexus One in 2010 was better than it is today with a Pixel 7. The fact that it arbitrarily decides to not recognize some contacts on some days. The fact that it can't handle me spelling out a street name when it insists on replacing the street name that I'm saying with something com…
Mine decided to helpfully alert me that there were three birthdays on January 1st, because it had somehow reset some contacts' birthdays to Jan 1, 1970.
Except when I went to check the Contacts to fix them, they had no birthday at all.
Death by a thousand cuts.
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#149I was watching a friend use Siri the other day (I've never used an iPhone) and I was blown away by how much it could accomplish in comparison to Google Assistant. He said he used Siri as the default way of interfacing with his phone, which I found interesting. Reading this list of removals, especially the removal of CALLER ID, on video calls no less, an insane choice - how much could that possibily cost to maintain?…
Can you give some examples of how your friend used Siri? I feel like I don't use it enough.
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#150Glad they're making changes because it couldn't possibly be worse. It is one of the few products I use daily that gets noticeably worse over time. Shopping lists, calendars, reminders, timers, etc use to work pretty well, but now they're absolute trash. There's a running joke in our house that one of us will ask the Google Home speaker something, it responds with either "I don't know", "I can't do that", or some biza…
On a good day, when it asks me for feedback I tell it to fire the person in charge. On less charitable days I throw in the rest of the team.
From what I read it sounds like your plan is working!