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Personalized Hey Siri

machinelearning.apple.com

41–50 of 78 posts

Re: Personalized Hey Siri

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should be able to say "Hey Siri, listen carefully" brief pause "isle ... of ... dogs", or some such to have the device enter a special mode where it attempts to identify individual words more accurately.

I've never heard about this special mode.

I meant to imply it should have this mode, not that it does.

Re: Personalized Hey Siri

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately “Hey Siri” starts to grate the 70th time you say it in 3 days. I would actually now rather walk across the room to touch the Homepod than have to say the phrase so much. It’s still in uncanny valley territory a lot of the time as it isn’t smart enough to keep context between interactions or react in a human-like way. I think a retroactive activation feature would be the way to go, ie. be able to say “Si…

It could be worse. "OK Google" is annoying the first time you say it.

Hard call when the functionality is far better with OK Google.

Re: Personalized Hey Siri

#43
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. In this case, the selection of a wake word ("Alexa") or phrase ("Hey Siri" or "OK Google") is driven primarily by performance (i.e., reduction of false accepts & false rejects). The folks designing these products know that, even though customers say that they'd like to customize the wake word or phrase, if the actual performance is significantly worse, those customers will not be happy. We experimented with this…

But it's infuriating when you don't want to use the phrase and/or want to have a secret phrase. Better would be to allow customers to choose their own phrase and give immediate feedback, during setup, on how good it's likely to be.

There's such a difference, and it's so hard to find really high-performing ones, that you would be constantly telling customers, "that won't work well"...

We considered literally thousands of potential words. We also really didn't want anything like "hey" or "ok" to be required.

Note how long it took for "Computer" to be available - and you can imagine how many of us wanted that. I think it gives an idea of the difficulty.

Re: Personalized Hey Siri

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something about "Hey Siri, ..." is much more grating to me to say than "Alexa, ...". Maybe it's just that conjunction of phonemes being rare in English?

That's nothing compared to "Okay Google". Try saying that three times fast. Actually, try saying it just once fast. I always end up spitting out something like "Okaygggeellggglle"

It's utterly astonishing that Google still has the hubris not to give it a personal name.

People want to believe they're talking to a personal assistant, even if that isn't true, and Google is stupidly stripping them of that.

Re: Personalized Hey Siri

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nothing compared to "Okay Google". Try saying that three times fast. Actually, try saying it just once fast. I always end up spitting out something like "Okaygggeellggglle"

You can say "Hey Google".

The "Hey" gets extremely grating after the fifth time in a row.

Amazon has it right on this with Alexa.

Re: Personalized Hey Siri

#46
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they don't want to give users too much control; Siri is an important brand by itself and Apple doesn't want people going around skipping it.

Yes. In this case, the selection of a wake word ("Alexa") or phrase ("Hey Siri" or "OK Google") is driven primarily by performance (i.e., reduction of false accepts & false rejects). The folks designing these products know that, even though customers say that they'd like to customize the wake word or phrase, if the actual performance is significantly worse, those customers will not be happy. We experimented with this…

"Computer" should be the wake word, and everyone would be happy with that thanks to global, english interoperability in all places and contexts.

But thanks to the hubris of corporate branding and marketing departments we are unlikely to have this universally understandable command usable. Instead to use any light switch every consumer will need to ask what bloody set up the person has...

Re: Personalized Hey Siri

#47
post #2

On a separate note, I have yet to get Siri to transcribe "Isle of Dogs" correctly. It's always "I love dogs" which is quite ok by me :).

You should be able to say "Hey Siri, listen carefully" brief pause "isle ... of ... dogs", or some such to have the device enter a special mode where it attempts to identify individual words more accurately.

What's wrong with just saying "isle … of … dogs"? Why would you need to enter a special mode before enunciating?

Re: Personalized Hey Siri

#48
post #7
post #2

On a separate note, I have yet to get Siri to transcribe "Isle of Dogs" correctly. It's always "I love dogs" which is quite ok by me :).

The title of that movie was chosen specifically to be a homophone for "I love dogs", so Siri's confusion is understandable. :)

In 1992 Apple gave me a T-shirt for supplying speech samples used to train their System 7 voice recognition. Below a picture of bunch of apple cores strewn on a beach was the caption "I helped Apple wreck a nice beach!"

Re: Personalized Hey Siri

#49
post #2

On a separate note, I have yet to get Siri to transcribe "Isle of Dogs" correctly. It's always "I love dogs" which is quite ok by me :).

I just tried 'Hey Siri where is 'Isle of Dogs' playing - and it got it first time.

That’s easier because the language model knows that “where is I love dogs playing” doesn’t make sense grammatically, whereas “where is playing” does. On the other hand, just saying “I love dogs” might be a reasonable thing you may want to text message or something.

Re: Personalized Hey Siri

#50
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. In this case, the selection of a wake word ("Alexa") or phrase ("Hey Siri" or "OK Google") is driven primarily by performance (i.e., reduction of false accepts & false rejects). The folks designing these products know that, even though customers say that they'd like to customize the wake word or phrase, if the actual performance is significantly worse, those customers will not be happy. We experimented with this…

"Computer" should be the wake word, and everyone would be happy with that thanks to global, english interoperability in all places and contexts. But thanks to the hubris of corporate branding and marketing departments we are unlikely to have this universally understandable command usable. Instead to use any light switch every consumer will need to ask what bloody set up the person has...

Alexa devices actually have "Computer" as an option. I did it for a while, because I dislike pretending a computer is a person ("Alexa") and I certainly don't want to address a company ("Amazon"). I ended up switching back to "Echo" after I realized that people in my house say "computer" too often for it to work well as a wake word.
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