31–40 of 296 posts
We've been pretty good at word recognition for a while - speech not so much. Conflating the two has lead to a lot of confusion.
It's honestly quite shocking how sparse the research and implementations for everything is once you go beyond a single sentence/command that you shout at your personal assistants.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a croweded place the noise has to be cancelled or speech recognition application must learn to recognise with noise in input audio.
I think part of the issue is that we're pretty good at focusing and filtering. If we're trying, we can focus on a single voice when the room is noisy. The computer doesn't know which to choose and all voices seem equally important.
A big problem with the assistants is that as soon as they fail at a query they seem stupid, I feel stupid, and I stop using them for a long time. Last weekend I had the following failed queries: "OK Google, what is the air quality like at Mt. Shasta today?" "OK Google, add a waypoint for the last gas station before the mountain pass" "OK Google, what percentage of people can you detect to be wearing masks on recent I…
I use my voice assistant on my phone to set timers. That's it.
The problem is we (as in hn) can type faster than we can think of the words to describe. My wife always talks to google. It seems backwards to me. Next generation should skip speaking and wireless read thoughts. Language/speaking is a bottleneck.
The problem is we (as in hn) can type faster than we can think of the words to describe. My wife always talks to google. It seems backwards to me. Next generation should skip speaking and wireless read thoughts. Language/speaking is a bottleneck.
Do you suppose it's possible that speed isn't really what counts? In the era of typewriters, authors like C. S. Lewis opined that typing obscured their thinking because it was too fast. It didn't let them savor the words effectively. Maybe what we really need is to slow down?
A big problem with the assistants is that as soon as they fail at a query they seem stupid, I feel stupid, and I stop using them for a long time. Last weekend I had the following failed queries: "OK Google, what is the air quality like at Mt. Shasta today?" "OK Google, add a waypoint for the last gas station before the mountain pass" "OK Google, what percentage of people can you detect to be wearing masks on recent I…
It could even be done on the phone itself, although battery life and heat would likely be a problem.
The fact that it doesn't work just shows that Google isn't that interested in their Assistant.
Which is rather strange, but maybe they're looking for better ways to monetize it?
Or maybe it's going the way of Reader once AR gains momentum or something... then again Google Lens is a really nice product and no one I know even heard of it.
I'm amazed at how well it can recognize any kind of writing, even my chicken scratch, and how it can look up any products/labels with decent results.
A big problem with the assistants is that as soon as they fail at a query they seem stupid, I feel stupid, and I stop using them for a long time. Last weekend I had the following failed queries: "OK Google, what is the air quality like at Mt. Shasta today?" "OK Google, add a waypoint for the last gas station before the mountain pass" "OK Google, what percentage of people can you detect to be wearing masks on recent I…
Well put. I don't know how much of FAANG's budget goes towards improving voice assistants, but considering how much cash these companies have on hand and their operating budgets (the size of some smaller European countries), the progress in that area is just super disappointing. The 3 most common use cases were refined a long time ago (Directions, Alarms and Play Music) and everything else ran into a hard wall.
- "Take me on the most scenic route to X." Can't you figure that out from social media tags? Simple first order solution: routes that have more photos with more likes = more scenic. Took me 1 minute to think of that. And 1000 engineers at Google couldn't implement that? These data crunching tasks are the kind of stuff computers are supposed to be good at.
- "Navigate to X but make sure you stay on paved roads." An actual problem if you are trying to use Google Maps in the back roads of California and don't have a 4WD vehicle. Google Maps loves taking you on 4WD dirt road detours. Don't you have satellite maps and street view? Can't you differentiate paved roads from unpaved ones? What the hell does your machine learning department do?
- "Stop at the last grocery store before the highway 120 junction." Yeah, it doesn't even begin to understand this type of query.
- "OK Google zoom out the map slightly." Nope. Sorry.
A big problem with the assistants is that as soon as they fail at a query they seem stupid, I feel stupid, and I stop using them for a long time. Last weekend I had the following failed queries: "OK Google, what is the air quality like at Mt. Shasta today?" "OK Google, add a waypoint for the last gas station before the mountain pass" "OK Google, what percentage of people can you detect to be wearing masks on recent I…
But your examples are way harder than they sound. Speech or non speech analysers have a hard time with context. What do you mean by "recent" photos. And what percentage? Of people wearing mask in each photo, or of 1 or more people with a mask in the whole set of photos? Or the percentage of photo having all people wearing a mask. We humans make a lot of deduction from context. We haven't been able to teach computers…
“Here are the results I found for the last week...”
“Show the same for the last 10 days”
I've had a similar experience, worked in voice for a long time. I simply have no desire whatsoever to speak to my electronics, I don't find it helpful or useful in anyway.
"Turn on the lights" isn't exciting. "Make dinner and do the laundry" would be exciting, but that's at least 25 years and some major advances in robotics away.
IoT is very crude and contrived compared to what would be possible with an active technology that could do useful physical things of all kinds.