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Changes we're making to Google Assistant

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Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant

#201

Post by Cheer2171 »

alganet wrote: post #186
theptip wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, beware “no true Scotsman” here. But I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis that GPT-4 is “good enough” or close to it, and when the current assistant services get wired up to LLMs we’ll see a step function in their utility. Apple and Google are both definitely working on this. OpenAI’s voice mode is closer capability-wise, but doesn’t have the integrations; that would be an obvious product for them to do this yea…

Sounds to me like a silver bullet idea. "LLMs will make it good". I don't think voice is a good interface. "It chats like a human" is the lowest possible hanging fruit in terms of product design, and bets everything on the smarts of the tech that's behind it. We are so used to tooling faster than voice. Keyboards and taps are very, very fast. I want digital assistants as smart AND as fast as that, not something smart…

Agreed. I find it utterly exhausting to talk to most humans, at least when my goal is purely transactional or functional. Human conversation takes work. Let's save it for what matters.

People hate call centers. I don't want to have a conversation with some human or human-parity AI at my airline, I want to change my flight in 3 clicks. In retail and fast food, self-checkout and online or kiosk ordering is popular for a reason.

I've found myself feeling those same feelings when being forced to have conversations with a chatbot. Chatting with ChatGPT just for fun can be fun, but it can be just as painful as a call center if you need to get something specific done. In order to cancel a hotel reservation, I was having to chat with some bot. It made it into a whole conversation, with brief pauses. It should have been 3 clicks.

Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant

#202

Post by dotancohen »

jfim wrote: post #189
dotancohen wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Discoverability is zero What's wrong with that? In VIM I like the fact that there is no interface cluttering my workspace. If I need a feature, I search for it online.

Vim has an actual manual and things stay relatively stable across releases. It's not the case for the voice assistants, where stuff breaks randomly and features are added/removed without notification.

Well then the problem seems to not be with the fundamental lack of discoverablility by UI poking, rather at the lack of official documentation.

Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant

#203

Post by bogomipz »

PopePompus wrote: post #176
bilalq wrote: post #87

For all the hype "AI" gets these days, it's amazing how much things have regressed. My Android phone used to remember where I parked and show it on my Google Now feed and a push notification as I headed out, all without ever asking it to do anything. The travel.google.com site used to show my itineraries without ever adding them there. Hotels, flights, car rentals, and more would be aggregated. Doesn't do that anymor…

Yes, Siri was initially amazing, but it never improved significantly. Several years ago Google's voice assistant was much better than Siri, but it has degraded enough now that it's roughly on a par with Siri. But however disappointing Google Assistant is now, it's better than it will be tomorrow.

>"Yes, Siri was initially amazing, but it never improved significantly."

I feel like the same can be said for Auto-Correct, also from about the same era. How is it that with all of the edge processing it's still the same old miserable experience? It seemed to me that it actually got worse.

Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant

#205

Post by mattbee »

RexM wrote: post #143
pflenker wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a Brit, when I bark "Alexa, set a timer for 5 minutes" and Alexa prefixes her reply with "Good evening ", TO ME that sounds like a bitter correction-by-example to my abruptness. It's the sarcastic opposite of a pleasantry.

Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant

#206

Post by cure »

dotancohen wrote: post #188
afavour wrote: post #30

To 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…

> Discoverability is zero What's wrong with that? In VIM I like the fact that there is no interface cluttering my workspace. If I need a feature, I search for it online.

VIM is well designed and stable, so you can learn the interface and be confident that it will work for you next time you use it. It's an amazing tool.

Today's voice assistants are the opposite. They are unreliable and completely unstable. They don't have a clear list of commands they understand, let alone some sort of menu system - the documented commands on the manufacturer's websites often don't work. They also randomly change what they can do: stuff stops working for no obviously reason.

For example - yesterday, my son's Nest Audio suddenly refused to set a music alarm, claiming "this device doesn't support that feature yet" (it's literally a speaker for music...). It worked the day before.

Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant

#207

Post by SebRollen »

pflenker wrote: post #40
afavour wrote: post #30

To 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…

The constant "By the way..." from Alexa drove me nuts.

If you say "Alexa, stop by the way", it'll get the device to stop responding with follow-ups for ~24h. I ended up creating a routine that runs every night at 4am to lower the volume to zero, automatically say "stop by the way" to the device, and then raise the volume a minute later, and Alexa has stopped with the follow ups

Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant

#208

Post by rco8786 »

pflenker wrote: post #40
afavour wrote: post #30

To 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…

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve disabled notifications on my Alexa settings. And yet there it is…another yellow ring.

Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant

#209

Post by tharkun__ »

beachy wrote: post #184
gleenn wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not dying for them to record more than absolutely necessary, but I really hope all the voice ui engineers do log curses to know when their app is doing annoying stuff. The number of times these things screw up I definitely get really spicy and hope that feedback makes it back.

I tell my kids not to rage against voice assistants in case the machines finish up in charge.

Shut up, toaster!

Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant

#210

Post by aworks »

achates wrote: post #71
danielbln wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can ask Alexa e.g. "what's the weather at 9am", that doesn't work with Google Assistant?

"The weather in Nijmegen is..."

I tried this and Alexa replied:

The temperature in Nyagen, Russia is current -31 degrees...

I'm an American but I've been to Nijmegen so I think my pronunciation was ok.

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