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A comment on 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer. Parent comment

Re:25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to m... by drunkpotato on Monday October 26, 2020 @01:30PM (#24898682)
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.

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Re:25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to m... by heleninboodler on Monday October 26, 2020 @01:41PM (#24898815)
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?"

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Re:25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to m... by toyg on Monday October 26, 2020 @05:15PM (#24901508)
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.
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Re:25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to m... by dheera on Monday October 26, 2020 @04:30PM (#24901007)
... 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.
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