There's a really interesting discussion to be had about how UI decisions can make that process smoother — I really liked https://bigmedium.com/speaking/design-in-the-era-of-the-algo... as a call for how you can make the failure modes of the system more graceful. I think a lot of the success in the next decade or so is going to come from the places which figure out good answers for not making a system which seems to promise more than it can deliver.

It's not the voice UI that does this, it's the marketing.

If they sold it as "speak your google search terms", it'd work a lot better. It'd also be a lot less sexy, but that's still mostly what it is IMHO. Not to say that it isn't impressive stuff, it is! But it's highly oversold, still.

Very nice article, I only skimmed so far, but I think I agree with all of it. It has a definitely pro-consumer bent that I wish would come true, but seems like trends are in the other direction. I suspect there's too much money in search and improving query understanding at scale for companies that get there to be as transparent and open and sharing as this author is asking.

Perhaps Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft all initially thought that the revolutionary part was being able to speak a query and have the query match what you said, and that the search part was already good enough.

Absolutely. In fact sometimes I'm searching for something, whether in a search engine, at an ecommerce site, or whatever and I'm not getting what I want immediately. If I'm on a phone or tablet, I'll often grab a nearby laptop because it's just faster and easier to do a lot of typing and clicking on. (Less true with more recent tablets but my basic point is that there's sometimes a lot of fast iteration when I'm trying to find the answer to something non-obvious.)

I think @seiferteric's point was that the expectation may not be there because it is a voice search. That expectation is there because that's how it was marketed.

If the marketing for these things was: "Ask a question, and get search results by voice" I don't think I'd have the expectation that it find and deliver the correct answer to me.

But the marketing for all of these devices is: "It's a personal assistant! Ask it a question and you'll get an answer!"

I'm personally not convinced that the high expectations are because it's a voice interaction, but rather that the technology simply can't live up to the marketing pitch.

List decoding was invented by 1955. This is a set of hard problems, but very well studied ones.

"Set an appointment to play Lost Boys tomorrow." "What time?"

Currently there is one way for a computer to interact with humans via voice: direct and unquestioning answers.

I think you can. Alexa can read you the titles and you can ask it more information about a specific title. It’s like asking the waiter which desserts they have then interrupting him because you don’t know what a pannacotta is.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/design/inclusive

As an example, a coworker mentioned that his use of Alexa went from casual to heavy when they had a child and the ability to do things while carrying a baby suddenly became really important. I suspect there are more situations like that than we might think at first.

1. I know, 90s me is still getting used to saying that too

If I were to ask a question that had a long list of potential responses, I'd expect them to ask me to clarify or narrow down what I'm looking for or at least explicitly ask me if I really wanted them to read the whole list.

That said, for those of us who don't have personal admins, there's a lot of opportunity for digital services that fall between purely self-service travel booking as it exists today and and having an assistant.

"Claim: Comedian Bill Murray is running for president and proclaimed religion to be "the worst enemy of mankind." Claimed by: Internet Fact check by Snopes.com: FALSE"

It would seem they are reasonably close but this is more of a product integration failure than a recognition failure.

Bigger picture though, Bill Murray is famous making it easier to answer questions like this. In general, does the wording of the author's question truly imply he's searching for a fact check, and do you expect Google to know that even if there are no articles that match the wording of the question? The snopes articles does contain the terms "did", and "Bill Murray", and "run for president", so we don't have any evidence that Google understands the question, we just have some content that matches the query.

The issue I see is that the computational question of search has long been trying to measure relevance by matching the query against the corpus. This Bill Murray question is an example of how that can break down. I might actually want the fake articles... and I might not. There's no way for the search engine to know without making an inference, and the expectation that mass market search engines make inferences seems pretty new to me - and I don't expect that when I do text searching. I guess I just expect voice search to push the need for question understanding and inference making even faster than text search has.

My first Hacker News inclusion. I feel like there should be some rite of passage. Well, other than the sudden and unanticipated login attempts.

My testing device for Google was the Google Home speaker, which appears to have a different tolerance for reading search results. I've had it rattle off several sentences from web pages for other keywords in the list (see, for example, the boiling point of water), but for the Bill Murray question there seems to be some kind of limiter. I just re-checked, using the exact phrasing I had before, and it still says that it doesn't know, but it's learning all the time.

I'm guessing there is some kind of a relevance check for the speaker version compared to the phone version. The phone is probably happier to return any result (a la Siri), whereas the speaker appears to be making some attempt to understand what I'm asking for before reading search results.

This particular question appears to trigger the speaker not to read the search results. We can only speculate as to why: does it not find it relevant enough? Is there a reserved path on "Did xyz" questions when sent to Google Home? Am I unknowingly in the A/B testing group that doesn't get the answer? There's few ways of knowing black-box without massive data testing, but it is curious.

> I'm guessing there is some kind of a relevance check for the speaker version compared to the phone version.

I would bet on that & expect it too... I'm sure all these voice search products are experimenting with how voice search needs to be tuned differently than text search.

Also the query "did Bill Murray run for president" returns a Snopes article debunking the myth as the first result. This should totally be something a Siri thing could parse and tell you about.

https://www.google.com/search?q=did+bill+murray+run+for+pres...

That is, the things you need from a digital assistant -- you really need, and you need them right now. Otherwise you wouldn't be using a digital assistant to look them up, you'd look them up on your laptop like everyone else. I know, I know, in Africa no one has a laptop and their only computing device is a phone, etc, but in the first world, access to fully powered machines with full keyboard interfaces are ubiquitous, people prefer to use these types of interfaces for general research rather then their phones, and we turn to voice assistants when we are in the middle of doing some task and need specific information to assist us in completing that task. Therefore the expectations are pretty high. The frustration level of say, getting bad information about a store being open that you are on your way to is way higher than getting bad information about the height of the Eiffel tower.

To this day, I can't find out the hours of the stores I am going to. The whole experience is really frustrating:

"Siri! When does cup-o-Java close?" shows directions to random stores "Siri! What are the hours of cup-o-Java" shows directions to other random stores "Siri! Is Cup-o-Java closed or open?" shows directions to more random stores

On the other hand, I was stunned that I could walk the Byzantine alleys of Venice and get precise information about turning left in 100 feet to get to my favorite campo. These are tiny mazes of backalleys some wide enough for just a single person to walk down, and in which no cars are allowed, but they're all precisely mapped out so that I'm never lost any more. You can drop me pretty much anywhere and google maps will guide me out of there. But it can't tell me whether the museum in my destination is open today, or how much admission costs today, or whether they accept credit cards.

It's a bit like pressing I'm Feeling Lucky for your result. I'd hope that it was more optimized for always good results rather than often great, but occasionally lousy.