I never bother with such devices, because they hardly ever support European Portuguese properly and I am not going to speak foreign languages at home just to make a device happy.

I'm a British English speaker, and about 15 years ago I spent an afternoon experimenting with the basic voice recognition on OSX. I found that I had to mimic a US or Australian accent to get it to work, and I wondered what my next-door neighbours were thinking when they heard me cycle repeatedly through "Give me the phone number for Firstname Lastname" with British, US and Australian accents.

Scot here, I have this problem with telephone voice menus. Actually, I've also had this problem in the US as well, particularly while on the telephone. Putting on a fake US accent seems to work, but it's so damn embarrassing and I guess could be construed as offensive by some people (if they thought I was taking the piss).

I had the same issue recently with a BMW voice activation system I was playing with. Mimicking an English accent worked for that one!

It has gotten better, I think; as a joke, I recently asked it "what is weather tomorrow" in the most horribly broken fake accent I could muster, and to my surprise, it correctly annotated the question and responded.

When I still had a Windows Phone, I couldn't use Cortana because my phone was set in an unsupported language and it wouldn't let me use Cortana in English - if I wanted to use it, I had to switch the entire interface to English.

I would have spoken to it in a foreign language if they had let me. Instead, I have no idea to this day what Cortana sounds like.

European Portuguese? Does that mean they support Brazilian Portuguese better that actual Portuguese?

Probably, if they support Portuguese at all.

That is a pet peeve that we have back home, because of market size, many US companies rather support Brazilian Portuguese than any of other variants.

European Portuguese gets left out due to market size, while African and Asian Portuguese get left out due to buying capabilites.

Thing is, having to speak to a device, in another language variant just feels weird, leaving out the little detail that one does need to learn the differences as well.

TIL about Luso-Asians and Luso-Indians https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luso-Asians

> actual Portuguese

would you consider British English the only actual English?

Not only Brazil has 20 times the population of Portugal, but there are considerations to be made about how languages evolve in the periphery, which might not apply to Portuguese, but certainly apply to Canadian French vs French French.

No and many English variants suffer the same problems of US English first.

Try having a foreign wife!

I mean, it's not to make the device happy. It's to make the device do what you want, without you having to get up.

Respect though.

That only re-inforces the cycle of not providing Portuguese support.

Instead of paying for half working stuff and then complaying like many do here, I rather not give any money at all.

The only thing I regularly use Siri for is timers, where it’s genuinely quicker to say “15 minute timer” than it is to open the app.

Same here. And Alexa (Amazon Cube) is really relegated to muting my TV, lowering/raising the volume, and turning TVs off. If I install some outdoor cameras I might use it to check the front door, back yard or (if I had a child) the baby room. As a Windows user I never found a use for Cortana.

Alexa is the only one that turned out remotely useful for me.

I'd like to use the assistant on Android exactly for this, and probably a few other automation tasks. I love me some fiddling with semi-automated workflows. If only I wasn't averse to putting my voiceprint on Google's servers.

In case you’re not aware you can use the Shortcuts app to automate Clock for a timer and put it on the home screen as an icon. Works for Safari and Open Links if you want a home web bookmark, too.

I use Siri to ask it to use Waze for directions to locations I want to drive to. Works incredibly well.

Agreed, although I’ve found force touch on the Control Center icon a nice shortcut as well.

Nice, I've learned something today...

However, when busy, it still feels faster to say "set timer for x minutes" with just a long press on the home button.

It'd be useful in more if they were noticeably better today than when they were introduced. I wonder how much is down to intrinsic shortcomings with voice assistance and how much is just no one's made a good one.

IMO it's intrinsic shortcomings. These started coming out once the language processing got good enough to be reliable. And that part has continued advancing. But after you have that parsed instruction, what do you do with it? That's the part that's basically "AI hard" and is the real limiting factor. The "skills" approach routes around the problem by having exact keywords passed off to particular specialized handlers. But that means it can only ever do what it's been explicitly taught to do, and with explicit keywords.