Things said in our home all the time:
"Do you know what the weather is going to be like?"
"Is it going to rain today?"
"We need to buy some milk."
"The roast need one and a half hour."
We speak all the time with each other and there is nothing weird about that.
I bought a Google Home and it's literally transformed our lives in the little details for the better.
Before asking for the weather was something which required one of us to find the phone, open it find the weather app.
It sounds banal but if you have to do it every day because you take your kids to school believe me it's a godsend.
My wife was very sceptic about this and is certainly no tech fanatic, she now loves it because as she said she can now turn listen to radio just like in the old days when all you had to do was turn on the radio.
My kids love talking with it.
And it's basically just a very practical assistant which is revolutionary in the little details not some sci-fi scenario.
It's not disrupting anything it's improving the quality of tech by allowing us to interface with technology in one of the ways which removes yet another layer of abstraction.
You don't need to know what the system can do as long as it can do enough Google Home certainly can and it's just getting started.
Except that humans have an average IQ of 100. They understand context, they get what I'm trying to say. Try getting Siri to turn off all repeating alarms, just for today. Or turn off all alarms until 12pm.
"But that's not how Siri is supposed to work!"
Sure, fine. It's just a ux to a limited api. But then you can't also compare it to how we use the same input for humans. Robots aren't humans. Not by a long shot. They have an api, a very specific and limited set of capabilities. They are not flexible. They don't get context.
Voice interfaces have their place. Because once you know the api, the possibilities, voice may well be most practical. But not because we happen to talk to humans.
Thats like complaining about a commodore 64 not being able to run the same games as a Playstation.
The discussion is not whether Alexa, Siri and Google Home are perfect AI's but whether they are good enough for some very basic things like those I described.
And no it's not because we talk to humans that they are good, it's because we interact with other humans through speech.
Consider a voice operated light switch. Why do I need to tell the switch I want the lights to turn on when I enter I room? The house AI should know the ambient light level, the time of day, my location in the house, and my default lighting preferences, and lighting should "just work" unless I want to change something - which is when I can ask for it.
Alexa can't do any of this yet. I can give Alexa commands to turn lights on or off, but currently there isn't even a context for the current light state. So I can't say "Alexa, lights" and have Alexa work out whether that means "turn the lights on" or "turn the lights off" for the room I'm in.
IFFT may eventually be able to do this, but it's far from transparent and straightforward.
It's about affordances. I have a reasonable idea what a human's affordances are. The current voice UI (vUI?) equivalent is a handful of dots of implemented functionality surrounded by huge areas of not-working-yet space.
Not only is there no map, there's no way to guess what might be on the map.
It's also about cognitive load. I'm typing this in a bedroom with a couple of 433MHz switches controlled by a remote - one for a light, one for a heater.
Using the remote takes no conscious load at all. When I had the switches controlled by Alexa, formulating a command took effort.
That is unless I'm reading a book, in which case I need a light on. But not just any light, I'd probably just lamp next to me to shine on my book instead of the one that lights the whole room. I don't need the whole room lit, just my book. So now the contextual system needs to have cameras to see if I'm reading or just watching TV or playing on my phone or napping.
And when I walk into the bathroom in the middle of the night, I'm fine with the nightlight above the toilet. Turning on all the lights will wake me up and ruin my night vision. But my wife likes the light on. So now we need facial recognition to tell who is walking into the room.
Right now I have to get up and turn on a light if I'm on the couch reading. If we're talking effort, that's a hell of a lot more effort than saying "Alexa, turn on my reading lamp". And don't get me started on the effort it takes to try to find the missing remote...
I don't think you are appreciating the things that used to be which got lost with digitalization and now can get back.
It's not just about what the AI can do, it's how it gets expressed.
However, the voice ux projects at big tech companies are inevitably about collecting training data.
Five years down the road that limited API is going to be a lot less limited.
But that's not really an inherent issue with voice. It's just that today's systems are mostly stuck with requiring relatively strict adherence to specific syntax. This will certainly improve over time.
I don't find Alexa as transformational as some people I know do but I find it useful enough.
For example, a while back I was using Assistant to look up showtimes for a movie at a specific theater, and just to see what would happen I said "show me a map" without giving any explicit context. I was expecting Assistant to come back with a search query or maybe pictures of generic maps in response, but to my surprise it actually understood that I was talking about a map of the theater and gave me that.
Of course, that specific response in that exact situation isn't in and of itself all that impressive, and for every time Assistant succeeds in figuring out what I meant in a situation like that there's maybe one or two other times when it has no clue, but the idea of being able to speak 100% naturally to a virtual assistant and having it "just work" is unbelievably cool.
As a parent in New England, you have to choose between 3 jackets and when you are trying to get socks on two kids and can ask "alexa, what's the weather today" and know the answer without having to pause and get a phone and let one of the kids escape, that's really nice.
With modern heating systems (specifically thermostatic radiator valves) we no longer need to ensure that the heating is prepared at the right time, so we don't need to know the weather.
With the prevalence of tumble driers washing doesn't need to hang out, so we don't need to know the weather.
Most modern clothing is suitable for a very large range of temperatures and good waterproofs can be comparatively small and lightweight, allowing them to be brought everywhere without burden, so we don't need to know the weather.
Cars and roads have improved significantly, the impact of the weather on a small or long journey is often negligible, so we don't need to know the weather.
More jobs are performed indoors now and where they aren't special machines and tooling have been made that make the job easier alongside significantly reducing the risk and discomfort that weather can cause, so we don't need to know the weather.
There remain some situations where knowing the weather is very important, but very few of them affect 'the general populace' is a consistent enough manner to cause them to waste time following it.
Then again I'm British, and an American I've recently befriended has shown me how different attitudes to the employer employee relationship can be
Pretty much the story of modern civilization. Just step outside and check the temperature, and look up at the clouds and guess if it's gonna rain later. Wear a sweat shirt or waterproof windbreaker if in doubt. Or you can just not care about getting mildly cold or wet. I say this as someone who spent 25 years in Minnesota.
But sure, you don't need umbrella either and we could all be driving open cars :)
Don't get one if you don't want to, the discussion is whether it's useful and it is. Not just for the weather not just for rain. For many little things in life.
That's one example. Schedules, playing music, guitar tuner, uke tuner, metric conversion when hands are dirty from cooking, and plenty of other examples are abundant in our house
Nothing complicated about it, it's just a reality for many people.
Not sure what you think you are proving here.
I didn't really think of rain in my original comment because when I was growing up we literally just walked in the rain.
Again whats your point?
Both Alexa and Google home have been great with a kid.
[0] http://www.leevalley.com/en/images/item/Gardening/ab804s1.jp...
But then again, we live a few hours north of the location where they filmed the Battle of Hoth. Asking anyone, let alone a machine, "what is the weather outside" gives you little information about the weather in six hours.
https://www.amazon.com/AcuRite-02027A1-Forecast-Temperature-...
There is something about the tangibility of information we use a lot. Instead of it being hidden behind login, app launch etc we just access it directly.
For example, I can check the weather for today on my phone with minimal fuzz, clicking 2 or 3 times and getting much richer information (a full graph with short term forecast, a few hours in advance, etc) in a single screen shot. Another example, ordering a pizza. I prefer a GUI over calling and taking to some human. The options are clearer, and I can review easily what I'm ordering.
Not to say that it's impractical, but voice doesnt carry a lot of info for a lot of services. We'd prefer a phone call over an specific tactile interface for everything, and that's not the case...
I gave some pretty specific examples of what it's great for.
I am not saying it's great enough yet for much more complex things no disagreement there. But unlike Seamless web or mobile interface I could potentially just with the command, "order the usual from Joe's Pizza" skip a whole suite of interactions needed to order food today.
Telling Alexa "send me some paper towels" only works if you have established a protocol in writing with Amazon (i.e. I want a 8 pack of jumbo bounty).
Your use case "how is the weather" is useful, but is it useful enough to be "the next big thing"? It may be big, but not smartphone big.
My experience with both devices is that there's no one Big Thing, except maybe music. There's a lot of stuff that just works surprisingly well by voice. Quoting my daughter: "Hey, Google, play Puff the Magic Dragon" - "What's the weather today?" - "Turn on/off the lights" - "Set a timer for 5 minutes" - "What's 17 tablespoons in cups?" - "How long does it take light to get to Mars?"
It's probably not smartphone big. But I think that in the long term, we're going to find that some kind of voice-based interactive device like this will become very common.
I cook a lot, timing is important.
I have fun playing games with my kids teaching them trivia, Google Home does that while we are free to do other things.
We listen to a lot of different music. Google at home allow me to stream from Spotify simply by saying the type i want.
My wife likes to listen to radio, she just tell Google at home to start a radio station.
Listening to the news, google does a pretty good job assembling what is most important during the day.
You can ask it to play the latest "Startups for the rest of us" podcast simply by asking it to play that.
You can ask it when you next flight is.
How long it's going to take to get to somewhere.
You can add things to a shopping list which is important when you are family.
And these are just things that it does out of the box. I don't care about switching on lights which it also can do and turn the heat up or down.
What I think most of you realize is that just like the touchscreen removed a layer of abstraction to access technology because it allow for things humans do naturally. So does the voice. It's extremely intuitive as there is nothing to learn. As voice gets better and better it's going to change a lot of things.
The sales numbers of Alexa is pretty telling too and this is from all sorts of people like my parents in law who now have one they use and understand.
I don't care whether it's going to be the next big thing, but to claim as the parent did that voice is a bad interface is simply as wrong as it can be and to claim there is no value in what it can besides a few things, well it turns out at least for my family those few things are pretty useful.
"Ok Google, is it going to rain today?" is something I can (and do) ask at any point. No need to have a new device in every room of my house and no need to learn a different interface when driving in my car etc.
Oh god please. I can't understand how complicated radio is these days. Fuck me, I'm forever returning or rescanning or some bullshit just to listen to something.
Weather and traffic reports are still a staple of radio broadcasts
Hope it was worth the convenience.
As if knowledge of me visiting a public site is comparable to Google having an always-on microphone that probably is riddled with 0days and has constant internet activity that can easily mask a malicious connection?
it only takes approximately 10 minutes of recorded audio to interpret individual keystrokes with a ~96% accuracy. [1]
Google / NSA / foreign state hackers / your next door neighbor could potentially find or pay for an exploit to the device and have all of your passwords down within a few days. All of your children's passwords.
It can reconstruct every message you've typed in range of the microphone. Ergo unless you rely on bookmarks and not the address bar, it can in fact track which websites you visit. Furthermore, it could interact with ultrasonic sounds emitted by your computer speakers to track your ad experience, and if you live in a malevolent state, to locate you. [2]
If your kids are a problem to the police state, they will be identified and marked before they even know they want to be political activists.
This is the world you aren't only allowing, but are defending as well.
[1] http://rakesh.agrawal-family.com/papers/ssp04kba.pdf, https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tygar/papers/Keyboard_Acou...
[2] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-tha...
And then there are the ISPs you use to access the internet. Or the cellphone tracking your wereabouts or your camera and your microphone on your laptop. Or your router.
I could go on. If that's what you are afraid of that game is already lost.
You're trying to invalidate my legitimate concern over a device's security implications by telling me other devices have security implications as well. No shit.
The Amazon Dot is my favorite kitchen tool, we use it more than we do spoons at this point. The ability to set multiple timers, convert units and measures, and remind you to do things all while playing your favorite tunes is amazing.
"Google Now, Set a timer for..[slight pause]...<How long would>three<you like>minutes<a timer for?> [Pause, pause, pause] Three minutes. Three minutes! Three Fuck<Setting timer for>ing Minutes<three minutes>.
I am now manually inputting timers again.
"I'm sorry, mikestew, I didn't catch that."
Maybe if you waited more than 2.6 milliseconds for me start flapping my pie hole, you'd have something to catch.
I don't actually care that much for it as a time though. The other timers I can easily set in the kitchen tell me at a glance how much time is left. Alexa I have to ask. These are small things but it means I don't default to using Alexa.
However when you're preparing a meal or making cookies and you're constantly moving and not watching the clock, just responding to it, it becomes handy. It's also nice to not have to stop and wash your hands to set an egg timer.
HN isn't the best sample group for this, because for most people that's a pretty large amount of the time.
Fucking up food is a sin.
Sci-fi got it wrong with their humorous stupid robots providing comic relief while smart robots do the work. All the robots are the same smart, and getting better every day.
I'd like it if the knowledge graph was better, for answering questions. Just wikipedia queries is a bit lame. I think Google Home will win on that one.
Oh, and I'd really, really like to be able to voice call/skype through it (presuming the array mic + software will be able to isolate my voice/remove reverberation well enough).
IM (with TTS) could be fun too
I was a huge skeptic of voice assistants before the Echo came along, but being able to turn my lights on and off with a single voice command alone has been more than worth the price of entry for the Echo Dot + TP-Link Smart Switch combo I got for $60.
Sure, there is a niche for reordering products easily, but commodity voice tech is going to rapidly hit zero margins. Like those 10$ TV dongles that used to take a full PC.
Google makes 330 million in profit every week.
It's maddening. There's absolutely no way to discover how to use apps like this unless you already know how.
Just consult the nearest "X things you need to know/didn't know about Snapchat" article /s
It takes all of < 1 second. I get it is obfuscated but we aren't talking about a crazy level of interface hiding.
People expect to be able to swipe on most interfaces these days.
See you in a few hours.
"File, Edit, View" etc model is condensed into 3 horizontal lines. The lines I suspect were modeled on the idea of a row, with one option per row after another. Click "View" in a random app, oh look, one after another. Don't like that notion? Think of it as a Start menu in ever app, and you still have to drill down. It's barely a change, since the idea has existed since Windows 95!
Small screens need less chrome to highlight content. It's about the user having the best view of their content, not peddling a catalog of "me to" features and pretty icons in people's faces. Turns out, people actually enjoy seeing more of their content on desktops too, rather than rows of default icons.
Scrollbars? People still stop what they're doing to look for the scrollbar? I stopped dealing with that once MS shipped the Intellimouse 20 years ago. Tap/drag on mobile. You know how to tell if you're at the bottom of a document? It won't scroll further.
"It's maddening. There's absolutely no way to discover how to use apps like this unless you already know how."
But you KNOW how to use them already. They're just slightly modified. And these things have existed long enough now, there's no excuse not to just swipe either side or tap the hamburger to see what's up? I mean, how am I going to know what the new app using classic "File, Edit, View" menus does? By using the input options I have, mouse, keyboard, to dig through them. That hasn't changed on these new desktop apps. On mobile, input options are fingers, tap and swipe about.
This falls into a category of "Personally, I don't want to rethink things ever." type arguments.
However, it can't, it can't, and you can't. And when the illusion fails, it's frustrating: Neil Stephenson would call it Metaphor Shear, I (being less fancy) would call it why-didn't-they-give-me-a-better-ui-or-at-least-a-manual-dang-it.
This is ultimately why I prefer unambiguous interfaces over "friendly" ones.
1. It's slow. Apple AirPods are a good example. Siri controls the volume. Talking is slow. The input and response until the volume is changed is slow. Faster would be to use the long side of the AirPod as a touch control and sliding up and down it changes the volume. One finger slide = volume change. Two finger slide = track change. In any case, touch controls are way faster than voice.
2. It's weird in public, and faulty in loud environments. Talking aloud to yourself is going to get strange looks at you. I tend to do things that don't bring me attention, so I don't use Siri. Also, good luck using Siri at a concert or loud train commute.
This is how I thought about search without search operators. Then Google got it right and owned the market.
So I agree with you -- but I also think someone will eventually get it right, and that company will take off.
I don't think your statistics makes any sense.
99% of the time, you save time by speaking your intent, vs interfacing with your phone. That time saved is meaningful and outweighs the 1% of the time you have to fall back to your screen device.
99% of the time, you can use your hands/fingers for other tasks while speaking your intent. That allows you to multitask more efficiently.
Very true -- our Echo can control the lights, but I can never remember what each light is called, while with a GUI, I can see the list and it's obvious that "Livingroom - TV" is the light near the TV that I want to dim, while "Livingroom - TV table" is the one on the table to the right of the TV and I want to turn that one off.
I also don't like the feeling of having a dedicated microphone set up that records everything, waiting for a command and is completly intransparent about what it sends back to Amazon/Google/Apple.
Also, for the $100 price it frequently goes on sale at, it's a great wireless speaker with Spotify integration built in.
Also you're being very "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
The problem is: The electronic light control modules are expensive, break down after 1-2 years, and then go obsolete.
I'll spend more time rewiring my house than stumbling around in the dark!
When you say 'Hey Google / Siri / Alexa / whatever' a connection is set up to a real human who can control your house automation. Then the system could be self learning because the operator is translating your command into an action.
But it would not be for me. I absolutely never felt the need for home automation (don't think it is going to make my life better). And I care for my privacy.
Talking, while potentially more natural, is also simply slower than most other input types.
This is the same as the command line. Just like the command line, voice may not be completely intuitive initially but for regular use, it's probably much faster than a colorful GUI.
"Hey Siri, set a timer for fifteen minutes". Done.
That's friction, and that's where these frictionless interfaces step in.
People love to misuse that word.
I just tried it with best case scenarios, and it's still a second or so faster using voice (1.5 seconds) vs control center (3 seconds). I mean, voice is literally just yell out "hey siri set a timer for 15 minutes" and that ends the interaction. Done, just like that.
If you're changing the time that is set, it's significantly longer.
I think Voice Input should be an Additional, not as the ONLY input method.
I avoid these devices for the privacy concerns and also the generally poor security of IoT devices. I hate to sound like a luddite, but i really abhor these devices and how hard the tech companies are trying to foist them upon us as "the next big thing".
Either Apple/Google/etc and granulize the permissions such that things like "boolean: user is in vehicle at speed" are addressable separately (possible but unlikely) or such knowledge comes with a cost - the app knows where you are and have been.
Same applies doubly for "noise it has heard".
Consequently my decision is: no assistant, thankyouverymuch.
How will it learn to compare all these different environments? ML obviously; which pretty much entails leveraging the consumer data to provide a better product. The cost of usable, voice-driven assistants is giving up a vast trove of personal data and abandoning the concept of privacy completely, just so I can order some paper towels from an Internet of Shit connected device instead of walking three blocks to a store.
Your position is akin to a Louis CK joke(not offense meant): "Oh boy! I hope he doesn't do what he's going to do!"
Whether you're considering voice interfaces, connection speeds, machine learning, web development, phone battery life, or whatever.. things are trending towards the better. Sometimes it's steady improvement, other times it's punctuated. Either way, the floor on what we can considering is always increasing.
I think security is getting better but what we see now are the consequences of years of poor decisions. It's the post-Christmas credit card bill.
While not quite what you meant, Firefox is frequently bloody awful now and it used to be quite usable :)
Voice input is a terrible UX, because as a user, you have no idea what the system can and can't do. Every single Voice UX I've used for input (Siri, Alexa, etc) is a fumbling around experience where inevitably I can find out the weather, turn on some music, and then hear some half-funny replies from the device because it doesn't actually know what to do. It can work 99% of the time, but if that 1% it breaks down and I have to revert to a device with a screen, it kind of ruins the point.
Maybe Amazon is addressing this with their supposed Alexa with a 7" screen in the future.
What I want is improved Voice Output UX. I think Apple is trending towards this with the AirPods, where you can leave them in your ears all day and have Siri just talking to you, which is the only practical use of any of these things unless you're stoked about annoying everyone around you with your robot assistant awkwardly talking out loud all day.