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.