101–110 of 142 posts
Never understood why anyone would use Google Home or Amazon Echo when we all have phones. A DSLR camera is better than a phones camera, a voice assisting device seems replaceable however.
a) because some of them have semi-decent speakers for music
b) because it's nice not to have to pull out your phone (especially while cooking)
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The "ad" as described in my comment isn't really an ad in the typical sense, it's baked into the website. But the real reason is, I'm on my work computer and unable to install browser extensions.
You should urgently contact your IT department. Not enforcing ad blocking extensions is a security liability.
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There was an Amazon UXR study that floated around ~8 years ago that said the only things people care about from a voice assistant are music, weather, and alarms. PMs keep trying to make them "smarter," and it just makes the core user journeys worse. Surely they think they're inventing cars when we're griping about buggy whips. But it really feels like voice assistants peaked ~10y ago for the things people actually wa…
Considering the decade of poor results from doing anything other than music, weather and alarms I think we've all learned to avoid using them for anything else.
I have an android phone which means I use android auto fairly often. The sheer quality destruction it's experienced since transitioning to Gemini is incredible. I experience this mostly when asking for music. Before gemini, mistakes were common but deterministic. It was easy to understand where the query had gone wrong and so how to fix it. Example: "Hey google, play Blackstar " (Plays the album blackstar by David Bo…
"Hey Google, call my wife"
------> Immediately calls wife
"Hey Google, call my wife"
--50%-> "Is that XXXXXX?"
--25%-> Immediately calls wife
--20%-> "I'm sorry, I couldn't find a contact saved as 'wife'"
--05%-> Immediately calls someone different from my wifeI Fired theartofdoingstuff.com for extremely obnoxious ads - particularly the "Would you like to save this stuff?" one that greys out the rest of the article you're trying to read to... checks notes ... ask if you want the article emailed to you? Who the hell thought that was a good idea?
Why would you even browse the web without using an ad blocker?
Maybe you are saying "the whole internet is like that now, it's impossible to find good sites without obnoxious ads", but I don't think it's that bad yet (hacker news is a good counterexample). But if everyone keep visiting user hostile sites, the site operators will see no incentive to change.
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There was an Amazon UXR study that floated around ~8 years ago that said the only things people care about from a voice assistant are music, weather, and alarms. PMs keep trying to make them "smarter," and it just makes the core user journeys worse. Surely they think they're inventing cars when we're griping about buggy whips. But it really feels like voice assistants peaked ~10y ago for the things people actually wa…
For a bit, our Amazon Echo's were pretty decent at doing things other than music, weather and alarms. Then there was a big regression, and we stopped trying to make it do more. I guess the exception is turning the lights on and off. My wife and I both would love for the voice assistants to do more. They just won't. Even with weather, anything more than "what's the weather like today" will usually not get a good resul…
I use a timer every day to brew my coffee. With a voice assistant I can set a timer, but with the lack of a screen I can't see how much time is left. One day I thought, "I'm going to finally get around to digging into this voice interface and see what the options are," hoping for something like, "Hey Dingus, set a five minute timer and notify me when there's 10 seconds left."
Or better yet, "Hey Dingus, five minute timer, with notify at 10 seconds."
Notice that this almost maps 1:1 onto a shell command with option flags, just verbally interfaced: "$ timer 5m --with-notify 10s"
Notice also a complete willingness on my part to learn how the thing works and change how I'm using it accordingly. This is the opposite of end user laziness. I'm willing to invest effort in becoming a "Power User" of my voice assistant.
So I looked for documentation, ready to read and use my brain to understand it and do what it tells me in order to start and stop my timers with greater proficiency.
...I found none.
Literally, there isn't any. They don't have documentation. Nowhere is there, even for someone motivated and willing to learn, the ability to do so.
Ok, well that is understandable if these things are changing rapidly. Maybe there's the equivalent to a "$ timer --help" baked into the assistant itself. Maybe it can tell me what options exist so I can use them. I ask the assistant to explain itself. "What are my options when setting a timer?"
It can't parse my question. Literally, it doesn't know what I'm asking for. Because nobody ever considered that a user might ask that question or even want to know that information.
At that point, on the spot, I gave up. Clearly this thing is not designed or intended to be a thing that one could gain skill with. It's an utterly unserious product.
I would very happily learn an entire verbal DSL, a whole pidgin dialect of English, purely for interacting with my voice assistant. "Hey Dingus, five minute staged timer: thirty seconds, two minutes, one minute, one minute, remainder, with countdown from five seconds" is not "natural language" anymore. But you can bet you'd hear me saying it, if that's all it took to make the voice assistant run my coffee brewing recipe with nothing but my voice. And then, hey bonus, let me bind that to a personal shortcut so all I need to say is "Hey Dingus, coffee timer" and I don't even need to reach for my phone.
But you can't do that. It literally does not support being taken seriously. Or, if it can, the design is utterly hostile to me discovering how. So I've never even tried to do anything, since that very day, other than turning smart lights on and off.
My point is: I didn't fail the technology. I came to the table with willingness to tinker and experiment, willingness to change my expectations to suit the design as I discovered it, willingness to work to make it a part of my routine. The technology failed me.
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No good options on Android right now. You can use Firefox, but there are a lot of tradeoffs.
I'm curious what the tradeoffs are, I exclusively use FF and any time Chrome auto opens via a link I immediately baulk at the experience.
I used Firefox on Android for probably 11 years before switching to Dolphin (RIP) and then stock Chrome when Firefox made it a huge pain to install extensions. I keep waiting for someone to fully enable extensions on Chrome for Android.
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Firefox + ublock origin and voilà, no more ads.
Don't forget a pihole! Sometimes I really do forget how obnoxious the internet is until I try to look at a website when I'm outside of my ad free setup at home. Which in a way keeps me from browsing around websites on my phone and wasting time in that way.