It's funny, but for years I've felt like "Hey Siri, set an alarm for 7am" was 1000x easier than using the clunky Clock UI and it's almost exclusively what I use Siri for. Tasks that are so perfectly well-defined are exactly what this "smart" tech is useful for. Except that recently, Siri screwed me. I said "hey Siri, set an alarm for 6:30am" and her response was "Ok, your 6:30am alarm is on," but what she actually meant was "Ok, I ensured that your standing alarm for every tuesday at 6:30am is on" which meant she wasn't enabling the alarm for 6:30am tomorrow, so I overslept. Very annoying and completely blew my trust in a very useful function.

Alarms and reminders are my most frequent uses of Siri (and to entertain/frustrate the kids...). It's also pretty good for hands-free quick texts while driving and hands-free calling, though I don't do those often.

Your alarm example is frustrating. Of course, you could say "set alarm for tomorrow at 6:30 am" which would work, but then you're back in the realm not of natural language commands, but formal commands that exist in the uncanny valley, just similar enough to natural language to be irritating when they fail.

Yeah, I would think it would be obvious to most humans that "set an alarm for 6:30am" never means "6:30am four days from now." It seems like it should just be interpreted as the next occurring 6:30am unless otherwise specified, but hey, I'm not a computer.

Edit: also, your "tomorrow at 6:30am" example is also open to interpretation if you're saying it two minutes after midnight. I'd really like it to recognize these sort of ambiguities and prompt me for clarification. "It's after midnight. By 'tomorrow at 6:30am', do you mean you want your alarm to go off about 6 hours from now or the next day?"

Siri does resolve that ambiguity, it will ask you “do you mean 6.30am on day X, or 6.30 am on day Y?”, using weekday names for good measure. That’s actually one thing they got pretty well.

... and this is exactly the sort of thing where I feel much more comfortable looking at a GUI that clearly says the date, day, and time all in one place. It would take me 2 seconds to verify that it's exactly as I want it instead of parsing a voice assistant's response.

Ouch. I just did a quickie test asking Siri to set me a reminder for 'tomorrow at eighteen'. No dice. It set it for 8 am.

It doesn't even support 24 hour time - at least in English.

"...set an alarm for tomorrow @ eighteen hundred." works just fine. At least in U. S. English, I don't think I've ever heard anyone refer to 6 p. m. as "eighteen".

But that's the problem most people don't speak U.S. English as their primary language.

They use all kinds of languages with all kinds of accents and and ticks.

In my experience, and from the time I did a bit of NLP the situations is often along the line of. It works for mostly accent free simple English. Fails to get anywhere usable on most other languages and or accents. Sure that is to some degree because of missing training data. But for a consumer this doesn't change that for very many consumers this features work terrible bad.

Just out interest I tried out the youtube auto generated subtitle for a german video, but even at the parts where the text was super clear and well pronounced the result was hardly differentiable from randomly picking arbitrary words. It wasn't even that the algorithm choose similar sounding word. They where completely different words in many case. I think in a sentence of ~10 words in average 1 or 2 where correct. And that was at the parts where the text was unusually clear understandable. At other parts it wasn't even able to recognize that there where words...

Except it isn't a hundred, it's sixty, and I protest that usage. >.<. I prefer eighteen o'clock.

It's standard US military terminology and part of US culture and language.

Just imagine all the idioms they have to account for in these voice algorithms. I know in German they also handle "halb neun" correctly as 8:30.

That works fine in Siri.

Although it does have a problem with hours over 20 (“22 o’clock” becomes 20:02 for some reason, possibly because of my thick Italian accent).

but you would still understand them if they did or take 5 seconds to ask a clarifying question.

I live in Redmond, WA. Frankly, if someone asked to meet for a meal at eighteen, I would assume they would like to get together in a Microsoft cafeteria closest to the (what I believe to be non-existent) Building 18. My backup option would be to assume that they have received a hard blow to the head at some point in their life.

Again, whether I would understand them or not, no one to my knowledge speaks like that in U. S. English. It is a great example to use to show the quirks of language. It is a bad example to use to show that Siri "doesn't even support 24 hour time - at least in English".

I'm not English. We don't say eighteen hundred for 18:00, we say just eighteen. And I don't have localized Siri.

And in any case i said eighteen not eight a m.

Officially building 18 does not exist. Anything you may have heard about building 18 is just rumour. If you have any questions regarding the purpose of building 18, you should direct them to Shelley in HR.

Hey, it's been well over a decade since I worked there. :-)

https://campusbuilding.com/b/microsoft-building-18/

"report to Shelley in HR for re indoctrination" would be better :)

..."at eighteen"? "Eighteen hundred hours" is how it's pronounced.

On the google side, "wake me up at 7" results in a 7AM alarm 95% of the time and a 7 PM alarm the other 5%. Just frequent enough to screw you over…

Agreed, I find this to be a great use case for voice assistants. Or on the occasion I feel like napping after lunch "Hey Siri, wake me up in an hour".

> There's a reason that people use apps to get food delivery rather than calling.

Well, if I had some type of personal assistant who worked for me (as in, a real human), I would just call out "Hey, Sam, please order pizza for me" and continue with whatever I was doing.

The reason people don't make phone calls is they add a lot of additional friction. You have to dial the number, and wait for someone to pick up, and give them your address, and deal with frequently-questionable voice quality.

Pizza is a weird example because pizza joint menus are more-or-less standard and unsurprising. For any non-pizza restaurant I'll want to start by scanning a menu, which is way more efficient than listening to a menu be read to me.

And if you're already scanning the menu, just clicking on the stuff you want is easier than explaining it to someone.

However, if you frequently order the same thing from a given restaurant, having a way to order "the usual" from that place via voice might be convenient. But I'm not sure it's much more convenient than being able to do the same thing with a button click or something.

Your assistant is probably smart enough to remember what kind of pizza you like and from where, and will just order that unless you tell them something else. In theory, there's no reason your phone auto-assistant couldn't do the same thing, but we seem to be a long way from any of them having that level of intelligence.

Exactly! We aren't there yet technologically, but I think it's a worthy goal.

I don't know, I like swiping through photos of food to make my decisions on what to eat, and then it only takes about 30 more seconds to complete the order at most.

This is just the optimal halting problem; sometimes you want to spend time finding the exact thing you want, and sometimes you just want something that's good enough. Both problems don't need the same solution.

I still often use a phone call (or sms) for takeaway. It's faster than using an app or website if you already know what you want, and usually cheaper, since there is no middle-man.

For delivery, I agree. It is easier and faster to use a service, since my address and payment information are already saved.

That doesn't seem correct. People prefer apps because they are better at providing the information we need (menus, products, services etc) and the alternative for engaging through calls is either talking with overworked humans or a painful IVR service.

For me, the ideal interface to engage (order something, create a note etc) when you know what you want is through speech. It just feels so effortless.

I can definitely say that for food I MUCH prefer the web/app interface. I can swipe through a bunch of nice-looking food and just tap on something that looks appetizing.

You can't get that with voice no matter how you do it. It's like if a restaurant had no menu and the wait staff just recited the menu in your face and asked you to pick. Even with real humans, voice isn't the best interface for presenting food choices.

> if a restaurant had no menu and the wait staff just recited the menu

That's exactly how food is presented to you at lots of high-end restaurants. Once you get above the fast-casual tier, menus never have pictures. If you know a lot about food and you trust the chef, voice is a perfect medium for explaining the choices. Pictures are just a discovery aid.

That's exactly what I meant. The app interface is good for conveying information. But if you know what you'll order, eg - popcorn every weekend, just saying "Jarvis, order my usual popcorn combo" is so much more seamless.

The only two questions I ever ask Siri are "how cold is it outside?" and "wake me up {at HHam, in X minutes}"

I'm curious that you want to know the temperature specifically, rather than the weather. I'm guessing that's for reasons other than clothing choice?

I just feel like I get a more actionable answer than the "It's a bit chilly and overcast" I get when I ask about the weather – how do I know if Siri and I agree on what's chilly or not?

Cool, pretty sure for weather Alexa says something like "in $place today it's 10 degree with a light breeze and 40% chance of rain; with a high of 13 and a low of 8; have a good $day".