I hate talking to computers, so I don't see a voice assistant in my future ever. I'm in my early 50s by the way, and have been coding since I was in high school.

Maps/navigation is the only reason I even have a smartphone.

> Getting a voice assistant was life-changing for me

Can you expand on that? In what way?

Compare the workflows for leaving a reminder or note. Before:

    * Find phone/computer
    * Unlock
    * Locate self in interface and navigate to application selector
    * Invoke note-taking or reminder app
    * Type in note or reminder
    * Navigate through tagging/scheduling interface
    * Commit note/reminder

Or:

    * Locate notebook
    * Locate writing utensil
    * Open notebook to current page
    * Write note
    * Remember to check notebook every thirty minutes for the rest of your life

After:

    * Be in shouting distance of phone or assistant base station
    * "Okay Google/Alexa, note to self/set a reminder for eight pm: <blah blah blah>"

For most people the "before" is a minor inconvenience. These people don't really need organizational tools anyway. For people with memory problems the "before" is a rock wall that renders the vast majority of organizational technology functionally useless. You know how sometimes you walk into a room and realize you have no idea why you needed to be in the room? Or how thirty seconds spent answering email can end with all the the eggs you were juggling crashing to the floor and it takes you half an hour to get back "in the zone"? Imagine that, but it happens at the drop of a hat, five times an hour, in the time it takes you to say good morning to someone... or because you had to context-switch to execute the motion to unlock your phone.

There are lives that can be changed by organizational technology. But exactly this population was the one least well-served by classical note-taking and reminder apps. That "before" workflow was the six-inch drop at the end of the wheelchair ramp [1]. Voice assistants are a game-changer.

[1]: https://i.redd.it/x5qhwm2blyl01.jpg

    * Find phone/computer
    * Unlock
    * Locate self in interface and navigate to application selector
    * Invoke note-taking or reminder app
    * Type in note or reminder
    * Navigate through tagging/scheduling interface
    * Commit note/reminder

I just now took a stopwatch to time how long it took me to do all of this: 30 seconds, and 20 of those were walking to my office. That is not a negligible amount of time, but it's not a huge cost either. But...

    * Be in shouting distance of phone or assistant base station
    * "Okay Google/Alexa, note to self/set a reminder for eight pm: <blah blah blah>"

That's what happens when everything goes right. But based on observing friends who have Alexa, things only go right about two times in three. The rest of the time Alexa gets something wrong, often with comical results. The time it takes to recover from those situations can be a lot longer than 30 seconds. Often my friends just give up and drag out a laptop, or, more often, just decide that whatever it was they were trying to do really wasn't that important after all and give up.

I think the key difference is the focused attention and brain bandwidth to spend. Traditional way is way more efficient but requires more of that - you need to do a relatively long sequence of actions, coordinated to the goal. Using voice, there is no sequence, and it doesn't matter how many times you need to try and to repeat the same simple phrase - you spend no additional bandwidth with every repeat.

The voice way is like writing the simple add-mupltiply loop in C, and UI way is like writing the same in assembly (using vector extensions). Assuming you know how to do it very well, writing assembly code for that loop wouldn't be even longer to do. And you don't have a 100% chance the compiler will do the right thing with unrolling and vectorizing in this particular case, but most of the time you check the output and try another compiler options until it do the right thing, and only after a bunch of tries you finally resort to assembly. That's basic energy-conserving optimization present in people's firmware in their brain.

Yep. A garbled duplicate of a reminder or note doesn't cost anything and even alarms aren't a major issue unless they're set for the middle of the night, so if anything hiccups I just retry.

Your analogy touches on another important factor, which is that the human brain has a titanic amount of hardware dedicated to accelerating and reducing the overhead of voice. It's so good that it even participates in basic cognition, so most of the time the note you want to take is already right there and properly formatted for speech. There's a reason that "thinking out loud" is a thing. :P

Although to be fair, this is an emerging technology which should improve over time.

Anyone using a voice assistant now is almost certainly at the forefront of the technology. In five years or maybe ten they'll probably be a lot more impressive.

I've never had Google Assistant fail on something that trivial.

And as the type of person who has always struggled with calendars and notes apps, it's really valuable to me.

> * Find phone/computer * Unlock * Locate self in interface and navigate to application selector * Invoke note-taking or reminder app * Type in note or reminder * Navigate through tagging/scheduling interface * Commit note/reminder

This is just bad UI. Voice assistants and search have been used to paper over a serious decline in UX over the past decade or two. PDAs from the late 90s had much better note taking workflows.

Or (android example)...

Physical:

----

  1. Find phone (Is this really an issue? Haven't they become an extension of our body?)
  2. Unlock phone with thumb (unless of course you're already using it).
  3. Type "make a note to do the thing" into the big text box at the top of your screen.
  4. Preview / confirm it's what you wanted.
  5. Hit "Checkbox" to confirm.

By Voice:

---------

  1. No need to find the phone (assuming it close, which I'd say is a fair assumption).
  2. Say "OK Google".
  3. Say "Make a note to do the thing".
  4. Depending on current coverage, wait while it goes to the cloud to figure out what you mean (annoying).
  5. Listen while it tells you what it did.
  6. Say "Yes" to confirm.

My point is that the equivalent workflow exists via typed text. The workflow itself is not coupled to voice.

That being said, I do agree that it's very convenient to use voice for these sorts of tasks. Especially when driving.

I just walk over to my fridge and write it down with the dry-erase marker stuck to it. No issues with voice recognition misunderstanding, and it's trivial to do something more complicated like add to a specific list.

If it worked, yes, absolutely. On my Android phone, however, the note-taking process is as follows:

"OK Google!"

wait 5-10 seconds for the assistant to chime. It might work if I don't wait, but mostly doesn't. Sometimes it doesn't wake up at all.

"take a note"

wait for the assistant to ask what the note is

"Remember to put your shoes on!"

Check whether the note was taken correctly

Also, if I was actually using the phone for something else:

switch back to the app I was using when it occurred to me I should remember to put my shoes on

That's a bit odd. What version of Android are you on, does it have any of those junk manufacturer skins, and how old is the phone? If my phone is already unlocked I can spout off the hotword, invocation, and content in a single stream, the assistant pops up in an overlay and prints the note for me to check visually, and then it finishes and hides with no further intervention. Pixel 2 XL, fully patched, it's worked like that since I got the phone.

If you're having trouble with getting the assistant to wake up, and you don't see an improvement after running through the wizard you get when you say "retrain voice model" or "recognize my voice", you should also be able to get the assistant up by long-pressing the middle button in the navbar at the bottom. You additionally shouldn't need to wait for a response after saying "take a note", just dump it all in a single breath.

> when it occurred to me I should remember to put my shoes on

...Are you mocking me? I thought I'd made it pretty clear that I used that tools to help compensate for a memory problem that does, in fact, qualify as a disability. Try "okay Google, remind me at eight pm to reply to $friend about $thing". Or "okay Google, remind me every day at two in the afternoon to make a dentist appointment...".

Sorry, I definitely didn't mean to mock you! It's just that lately, I feel like I might just forget to get dressed and that's why I'd like to use voice assist to build a to-do list. Too many things going on at once.

Yeah, this is the "killer app" for voice for me. It's the only thing I use Siri for on my iPhone, although I do have that to require a long press instead of wake-on-voice.

For people that are already into the IoT space, I think it's a no-brainer. I have smart bulbs (Lifx). They look great but have little to no support for physical switches, and the app works OK until you want to have two phones controlling them. Suffice to say, voice control has made the experience 10x better especially for guests. Now, we also have a Roomba and some other smart things. Rather than get a new app for everything, it's all controlled by once interface.

> ather than get a new app for everything, it's all controlled by once interface.

Makes sense.

But why does that interface have to be the clumsy, always listening crap that we see today?

And why can no one except Apple[0][1] give any guarantees with regards to what they use my data for?

[0]: No, I'm not a Apple fanboy. I just can't stand their UX, seriously, which is sad since I value their current stanace on privacy.

[1]: And for what it's worth, Apple seems happy with selling out if the alternative is leaving the Chinese market behind as documented elsewhere in this thread. Although I'll admit that from what I read they where up front with their Chinese users about the change.

The simple fact I can call people while my hands are on the wheel is a non-trivial improvement in my life.

Basic voice dialing has been a thing for at least 15 years. Its progressively gotten better, and alexa et al. are no leap forward. The old sytems, while perhaps flawed, at least did not send recordings of you anywhere.

I'd be fascinated to hear how.

I can imagine things a digital assistant could do that I'd value quite a lot, but none of them are done by what's currently on the market. (And most of them would involve heavy smart-home integration, which makes their privacy failings even worse.) Meanwhile, the offerings I've actually seen so far look like their maximum utility would be converting tablespoons to cups while my hands are messy from cooking.

Yes, hence: YMMV. (Which, in case you don't know, is an acronym that stands for "Your Mileage May Vary", which in turn is an idiomatic expression meaning: a reasonable person could disagree.)