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Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

theguardian.com

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Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#71

Post by harvey9 »

jsjohnst wrote: post #24
ghaff wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voice control is mostly pretty disappointing. Setting an alarm, playing an album, getting a quick weather forecast? OK. But something more complicated where you really would like good voice control--like when driving--not so much. For example, with podcasts, I find I really need to pre-populate a playlist and by and large I find trying to totally control my phone by voice is very hit and miss. Voice assistants have g…

> But something more complicated where you really would like good voice control--like driving--not so much. I’ve tried Alexa, Google, and Siri multiple times over the years while driving and it’s just embarrassing how over hyped all of them are and yet simple questions which a human could potentially easily answer in seconds doing a search (if not driving of course), but none of them even get close. - How far away is…

You can easily search how far away is that storm?

The others really ought to be voice searchable, but the diesel one would need to be timely in my area, where a couple of places have not had diesel available for several days.

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#72

Post by marcosdumay »

feintruled wrote: post #8
feintruled wrote: post #6

I don't think this particular incident is any kind of big deal, though it's funny. It was only a £1.99 a month and there was a 7-day free trial anyway. Amazon say they emailed about it as confirmation. I think the issue it shows is how you can't trust voice control for anything important. It's just a bad interface for buying stuff particularly. If I am buying some dog food, I search dog food, glance over the options,…

Update.. I tried just "order dog food" and it picked a decent choice based off my order history and then I could have said "buy this". So to be fair (with a device with a screen) it performed quite well.

Good that you tried it.

There are plenty of ways to make the interface very usable and reliable. Fixating on the voice UI is absolutely the wrong way to see it. The real problem is that your "assistant" doesn't actually work for you.

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#73

Post by CrazyStat »

ghaff wrote: post #61
CrazyStat wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> buy measuring cups in US sizes Measuring cups are an objectively terrible unit, since (1) the volume of a cup, while officially standardized, is not consistent across the measuring cups you'll find in stores, and (2) the amount (mass) of common ingredients in a cup can vary wildly--50% or more--depending on how densely packed the ingredient is. A "standard" cup of flour is generally considered to be 120-130g, but i…

>Measuring cups are an objectively terrible unit For baking, I'll generally weigh and, for flour, pretty much always. However, I use measuring cups all the time for other cooking where recipes may not even give a weight equivalent to a volume of something.

That's fair. In many recipes volumes can be taken as vague suggestions.

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#74

Post by robonerd »

CrazyStat wrote: post #63
jsjohnst wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A "standard" cup of flour is generally considered to be 120-130g, but if you buy a brand new bag of flour at the store and scoop a cup off the top you may be getting as much as 200g, since it's densely packed. I’m not debating if the US method of measurement in recipes is terrible or not (it is!). But taking an imprecise unit of measurement and lossy converting it to another is better (edit for clarity what I meant…

Yes, converting a cup of flour to 120g of flour is absolutely better. That way your measurements will be consistent from day to day, so you can learn and make adjustments--"This recipe calls for 300g flour, but the dough was a bit loose last time--I'll try 315g instead." (In practice I'd probably first adjust the liquid content rather than the flour amount, but you get the idea). If you're measuring 2.5 cups of flour…

If you're simply trying to follow volumetric recipes, then volume-to-mass conversions are useless because you'd be trying to follow the recipe with more precision than the person who wrote the recipe in the first place. It's like converting "1 meter" to "1000 millimeters"; it's false precision from not being careful with significant figures. The recipe says "1 cup of flour" and the bot says that means 120 grams of flour. But that's false precision, specifically because volumetric measurement of flour is inherently imprecise. There is no way of knowing the recipe author actually used 120 grams of flour.

However, you mention that you iterate and refine these recipes, effectively writing your own recipes using volumetric recipes only as a starting point. In this case, the conversions have real utility. But if you're doing it right, these are conversions you only need to apply once per recipe, after which you'll never use that original volumetric recipe again. Such once-and-done tasks don't really seem worth automating to me, but for each their own I guess.

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#75

Post by ghaff »

harvey9 wrote: post #71
jsjohnst wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But something more complicated where you really would like good voice control--like driving--not so much. I’ve tried Alexa, Google, and Siri multiple times over the years while driving and it’s just embarrassing how over hyped all of them are and yet simple questions which a human could potentially easily answer in seconds doing a search (if not driving of course), but none of them even get close. - How far away is…

You can easily search how far away is that storm? The others really ought to be voice searchable, but the diesel one would need to be timely in my area, where a couple of places have not had diesel available for several days.

>You can easily search how far away is that storm?

Pull up radar on Weather Underground (and/or look at the hourly forecast) and you should have a pretty good idea.

Whether or not that's the best example, the point is that there are a bunch of things I might want to know/do while driving that I can't look up without pulling off the road someplace. And even if I could theoretically look them up by voice, it would probably be an exercise in frustration to try to do so.

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#76

Post by CrazyStat »

robonerd wrote: post #74
CrazyStat wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, converting a cup of flour to 120g of flour is absolutely better. That way your measurements will be consistent from day to day, so you can learn and make adjustments--"This recipe calls for 300g flour, but the dough was a bit loose last time--I'll try 315g instead." (In practice I'd probably first adjust the liquid content rather than the flour amount, but you get the idea). If you're measuring 2.5 cups of flour…

If you're simply trying to follow volumetric recipes, then volume-to-mass conversions are useless because you'd be trying to follow the recipe with more precision than the person who wrote the recipe in the first place. It's like converting "1 meter" to "1000 millimeters"; it's false precision from not being careful with significant figures. The recipe says "1 cup of flour" and the bot says that means 120 grams of fl…

I have hundreds of recipes in my file that I've never tried, requiring thousands of conversions. Even if each conversion is only done once it's absolutely worth automating.

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#77

Post by evandale »

jsjohnst wrote: post #49
breakfastduck wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you're desperately coming up with nonsensical solutions that aren't as practical in any meaningful way. You honestly think having measuring devices for two entirely different systems or not using US based recipes is trivial compared to asking for the conversion out loud and getting it immediately? Yeesh! EDIT: even going back to your timer comment (to which you completely ignored the response), your 'trivial' sol…

> You honestly think having measuring devices for two entirely different systems If you want to make recipes based on imperial measurements, YES, and I’d also say the vast majority of people here would agree with me. Having a full set of imperial kitchen measuring cups costs less than any meal you are bothering to prepare and takes up less kitchen space than a single salad bowl. For your follow up edit: > to which yo…

This whole conversation is pretty pointless and "Having a full set of imperial kitchen measuring cups costs less than any meal you are bothering to prepare and takes up less kitchen space than a single salad bowl" demonstrates exactly why.

Having an Alexa and asking it how many grams are in 1 1/4 cups of white wine vinegar is easier than having 2 sets of measuring cups. It's easier than having 1 set of measuring cups.

0 measuring cups takes up 0 space and I have no use for them. I use a bowl and a scale. That's easier for me than messing with measuring cups and having more crap to clean.

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#78

Post by LorenPechtel »

piva00 wrote: post #34
ghaff wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voice control is mostly pretty disappointing. Setting an alarm, playing an album, getting a quick weather forecast? OK. But something more complicated where you really would like good voice control--like when driving--not so much. For example, with podcasts, I find I really need to pre-populate a playlist and by and large I find trying to totally control my phone by voice is very hit and miss. Voice assistants have g…

> playing an album Only if the album you want is titled in English (or some recognised language and with actual words). I listen to a lot of music that have unpronounceable song and album titles. Hell, even artists, how could I ever tell a voice assistant to play "STRGTHS by SHXCXCHCXSH"? An extreme example but not too far from some of the top 10 recently played stuff on my Spotify: "sch.mefd 2" by Autechre, "JNSN CO…

I use Alexa's announce capability to tell my wife to answer the phone--but what I actually tell her to say is in her native language, not in English. The announcement works fine but my phone tries to render it as English text. Never the same thing twice.

And she definitely does the 50/15 thing to me, although generally the other way around. Everything from 30/13 to 90/19 is vulnerable to being misunderstood. My wife has a lot more trouble with it--she learned her first word of English at 43 and so she still has a fair accent.

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#79

Post by LorenPechtel »

Agentlien wrote: post #70
ghaff wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voice control is mostly pretty disappointing. Setting an alarm, playing an album, getting a quick weather forecast? OK. But something more complicated where you really would like good voice control--like when driving--not so much. For example, with podcasts, I find I really need to pre-populate a playlist and by and large I find trying to totally control my phone by voice is very hit and miss. Voice assistants have g…

I tried using Google Assistant a few years ago and it was so frustrating in some dumb ways. A notable example was when I tried using it to make a call. I told it to call my wife, by name, and it couldn't understand her name at all. So I said "call my wife" and it asked who my wife is. I couldn't answer with voice, because it still didn't understand her name. But it did give me a popup to select her from my address bo…

Is she confused because you're a polygamist? :)

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#80

Post by LorenPechtel »

kube-system wrote: post #42
actionablefiber wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a pretty big edge case. In my family we also got an Alexa for my aging grandmother who was already shaky on computer literacy and developed serious motor/vision problems preventing her from using a computer. She learned just enough about Siri and Alexa to make phone calls, play music, and change the channel. There are definitely more old/disabled people out there for whom voice-activated assistants are not just…

It’s disgusting that these types of devices have potentially an obvious use as a accessibility device, and yet, that’s completely being ignored in lieu of mass-market sales gimmicks. We need an ADA that has teeth in the digital age. This is like a brick and mortar store building a ramp into their store for the convenience of people who can walk, and making it an inch too narrow for a wheelchair. Real corporate social…

You can turn off voice purchasing entirely.
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