> ML made it actually as good as a human being

How ML made it usable in some cases, would be more accurate. I still can't ask Alexa to play specific albums or tracks most of the time.

I don't want that level of accuracy driving cars on the road.

Google seems to have no trouble playing music from Spotify for me. It can even manage it while I yell my song requests from the shower.

The only thing I have ever wanted from phone assistants is to tell me whether a coffee shop was open or not, or what the closing time is. I still can't get this info, nor is this question understood. I still have to stop, launch a browser, navigate to the site, and dig around their website for opening hours, or in the worst case find a phone number and call to ask them.

The one thing that I can consistently get google assistant to do is to set timers: "Ok google set timer for 5 minutes". I want more of that. Could they please just implement and document simple recipes like this? Setting a timer hands-free is already incredibly convenient, and I can only imagine making something similar for a wide host of tasks isn't /that/ hard. I really don't mind if I have to formulate it in a rather specific way, as long as it works and I can find out what that way is.

What phone assistants are you using? I’ve never had this problem.

Siri

Same here, Siri solves this problem.

Me: “Hey Siri, how late is x open?”

Siri: One possibility is on x street, does that sound good?

Me: Yes

Siri:

“X is open from y-z.”

I just tried it and you're right, it works. Well, it didn't used to work so I stopped using Siri. I regret the error.

I wonder if people assume Siri failed to understand the query when they hear its request for clarification. I think it should include some context, eg: “Which x do you want opening hours for?”

The weird names and track titles that dominate electronic music has made this quite difficult for me.

Better GPUs is what enabled modern ML, it wasn't a CS breakthrough.

I dunno. I'd say new classification strategies like K-Means* really did it. Without that, all the power in the world doesn't get you anywhere.

* https://www-cs.stanford.edu/~acoates/papers/coatesng_nntot20...