News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Voice Is the Next Big Platform, and Alexa Will Own It by ghaff on Monday December 19, 2016 @04:17PM (#13215056)
The general issue I have today is that, for a lot of things, voice can feel like an exercise in coming up with the right wizard's incantation--especially as you add Skills, etc.

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.

Re:Voice Is the Next Big Platform, and Alexa Will Own It by Ajedi32 on Monday December 19, 2016 @05:07PM (#13215397)
Google Assistant is slowly getting better with stuff like this. While usually I stick with the commands and syntax I _know_ works, occasionally I'll try getting fancy and throw it a curveball by just speaking 100% naturally and Assistant will surprise me by actually doing what I intended.

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.