Why are all these assistants a bunch of rigid regexes and canned responses rather than just a frontend to a language model that can do/say anything?
It feels like 2010's tech that couldn't keep up.
Changes we're making to Google Assistant
261–270 of 302 posts
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#262I once interviewed someone working in the Google Assistant org. His job was to build technology that would detect "unusual sounds" that the microphone picks up while awaiting a "Hey Google" prompt. I went home from that interview and threw my Google Home device in the trash.
Are you talking about the (opt in) accessibility feature where you can get visual notifications when your doorbell rings and things like that?
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just voice, but conversational interfaces in general that have this discoverability problem. That means chatGPT. I'm glad people are discovering it, if you excuse the pun. CUIs are not a panacea, not a replacement for conventional UIs.
There are obviously cases where CUIs work well: while driving if you don’t have a physical button to do the thing you want, the CUI is better than a screen UI, and if it’s a complex thing, you would never have a physical button for it anyways. In the home when you want to control devices in the morning “open all the shades” or “open the north shades”, unlock the door and start the car, etc… Not really conversations t…
I’ve had exceptionally bad experiences with car CUIs - all the problems of trying to figure out exactly how to tell Alexa what to do (and then figure out what Alexa actually _did_) while going 70mph in traffic. Just give me physical buttons.
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#264I know what would be a killer feature: the ability to turn it completely off and delete it and never have to see it ever again.
> turn it completely off Instructions from first search result for "disable google assistant" might work? I found the option buried about 5 menus deep[1], but I left it on since it never triggers for me anyways, probably because I didn't set it up. [1] Settings -> Google -> Google applications -> Search and assistant -> Google Assistant -> General -> Disable My phone UI language is not English, the list above are my…
This turns it off but it does not disable the ways it shows itself as asking to turn it back on via gestures, or in other menus and applications.
https://www.howtogeek.com/741457/how-to-disable-the-google-a... worked for me
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#265Some of those removed features are quite bizarre.
> Managing a stopwatch on Smart Displays and Speakers. You can still set timers and alarms.
You already have a clock app, probably based on the standard Android one, and how many commands are for stopwatches?
> Using your voice to send an email, video or audio message. You can still make calls and send text messages.
What’s the big difference between sending a text message to a phone number via the messaging app, and sending an email via the Gmail app? It’s probably a single API call with a few parameters.
> Rescheduling an event in Google Calendar with your voice. You can still schedule a new event.
> Calls made from speakers and Smart Displays will not show up with a caller ID unless you’re using Duo.
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#266Earlier 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.
Luckily the Google Assistant is basically worthless.
Setting a timer and have it remind you that you could have set an alarm instead is annoying, but there have been multiple examples where we set a timer and the Google home mini seems to forget it.
> okay Google, set a timer for 1 hour
>> Certainly, and did you know that I can also look up Wikipedia entries for you.
>> Timer for 1 hour has been set and is starting now
> okay Google, how much longer left on timer
>> You don't appear to have any timers set at this time.
I'm pretty sure that our robot overlords will either forget, get distracted with generating mis-information, or become artists painting portraits of furries.
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#267And here I was a few months ago, looking at the rise of Large Language Models and ...
expecting a resurgence of all these natural language assistants.
I was expecting to see the effectiveness of these assistants go through a step change for the better, and use cases exploding.
Expected the established players like Google and Amazon being able to finally justify building so many of them and selling them cheap with and uncertain pay-off all these years.
Alas!
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's never going to happen. The Personal Computer revolution was made possible by economies of scale in industrial manufacturing of relatively simple components. Companies made money by selling widgets to as many people as possible. By definition, AI is only made possible by advances in massive computation capacity, which is easier to achieve and improve with centralized models. This is always going to be the realm o…
> By definition, AI is only made possible by advances in massive computation capacity By what? In the words of Inigo Montoya: "The way you use that word... I do not think it means what you think it means." Sure, we're kinda-brute-forcing things now, but that's no physical law (nor dictionary definition) declaring that digital assistants will be just captive pen-pal lamp-genies of Big Companies inside their Big Comput…
It will still be inferior to what Big Money will be able to serve, in a field where each marginal gain makes a massive qualitative difference.
AI is a buzzword for "tons of clever statistical software running hot to mimic (the output of) our complex brain processes". Big Money will always do that sort of thing better than the Taiwanese, and there is absolutely no incentive to turn a rent-extracting networked service into a widget-selling proposition, even once the field stops progressing at the current pace. Everything is now networked, so everything can access what will always essentially be "Brain as a Service" (BaaS, surely someone coined this already...).
Will we see specialized-hardware AI tuned for this or that task? Probably. Will we have portable configurable AIs? Possibly. Will either of them be as good as Big Money models, which can continuously feed on subscriptions and web-scraping at massive scale? Very, very unlikely imho.
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#269Earlier 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 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 ran…
So the problem is with lack of documentation and unstable UI, not with the lack of discoverablility per se.
Identifying the problem is often the first step in fixing it.
Re: Changes we're making to Google Assistant
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Google has actually removed all third-party integrations for Assistant a while ago: https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset In other words, they have just closed down that entire ecosystem. I don't think there's an antitrust angle here: Forcing e.g. Apple to allow third-party apps or app stores seems within reach (at least in the EU); this would be more like forcing Apple to enable apps in a world w…
"If there is no banner, your Actions project is not a Conversational Action and won’t be affected." Here, "conversational" means your voice command should prompt the app to ask you a question, driving a state machine. (Set a reminder. When do you want to be reminded?) I haven't tried to use it, but the docs indicate CRUD-over-voice ("built-in intents") is unaffected. https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset#…
Aren’t these only available on Android, though (i.e. not on Home speakers)?