Meanwhile, button in vendor app will not use internet so lot less can go wrong.
I don't do lots of home automation mostly because the automation isn't practical in a new build house that has switches in appropriate places. There are extremely rare circumstances where I want a light on/off in a room I'm not in. However, it would be a fun project to build a nice remote control with switches and knobs that you can program and have it talk to the home automation solution. To make it even more fun, I'm talking hard flip switches and volume like knobs, really tactile.
Kidding aside, with all those non-deterministic assistants, it will be hard to see when you’re hellbanned from a service.
Did they test this at all? Why would you ever pick a more complex/verbose option from the results list?
I use Android Auto in my car for safety. God forbid I'm listening to a song and want to queue up another one right after. I don't think I've ever gotten that behavior to work without either skipping the current song or adding the second song to the end of the queue. And even that's assuming that it even recognized the proper song out of my library and didn't try to go to Youtube or something.
Meanwhile, if my buddy is riding shotgun, I can just say "Hey, put on Peace of Mind next"
“Siri, play Beethoven”
<plays a Beethoven-derived hiphop track>
!!!
These products are just hilariously bad.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/De-Bach....
Same way Siri understands the english “Los Angeles” even though the G sound is completely different from Spanish.
The english IPA for Bach is straightforward.
The audio clip the person posted was for a true German pronunciation, which happened to be very different than how 99% of English-speakers would say it.
Not only Siri — the whole iOS. You can’t type a sentence switching languages in the middle, without changing the keyboard language all the time, if you have autocorrect enabled. It will change what you type into utter gibberish, even though without the “correcting” what you type is perfectly correct. This system is quite visibly designed by people who speak only one language and don’t understand that people may want to use multiple languages at the same time. The keyboard should support a mix of languages, instead of making a XOR between languages, because otherwise when it starts, it’s almost always in the wrong mode, and if it isn’t, it will almost certainly be wrong by the end of what I write.
This is an insane standard. The [x] at the end of the German word doesn't exist in English; most English speakers wouldn't be able to pronounce it if they wanted to. When the demands you're making are literally impossible, the problem is you.
They're going to use the sounds that exist for them, yes.
> That seems to me a way more "insane" standard.
I hope you never get to make any decisions. Dave Barry once wrote about someone thinking "What an idiot I am! Here I am, a Japanese person, in Japan, and I can't even speak English!"
But then again, Dave Barry was joking.
> By the way, the Scottish are perfectly able to pronounce "Loch Ness"
The population of Scotland is 5 million; if you want to talk about "most English speakers", the Scottish aren't even worth noticing.
> They're going to use the sounds that exist for them, yes.
That wasn't the question I asked. They will at least try to pronounce "Heath Ledger" or "Chopin" correctly, they won't act as if there was a correct German way to pronounce those names.
'th' is the obvious one that non-english speakers struggle with. I remember a dutch guy laughing at my attempts at various dutch words - I literally could not hear the difference between his pronunciation and mine.
And 'ch' (as in Loch or Bach) is a sound in Scottish english but not in English english.
I lived in Scotland till I was 4, then moved to England and all traces of my previous Scottish accent are long long gone. But my friend, whose surname is Donnachie, says I'm the only English person she's met who pronounces her name correctly - I guess because I learnt that sound early on.
Similarly, my dad, who learnt english in India, still struggles with a "j" sound (he says "zudge" instead of "judge"), despite living here for 50 years and having a posh middle-class English accent that sounds just like a "native" english speaker.
You need to talk to a Scouser! Back and Lock will be pronounced Bach and Loch.
I was not upset, annoyed, or confused. It's just the way language acquisition works. You learn the sounds you need and the rest are hard to acquire later in life.
Be strict in what you send, forgiving in what you receive.
As a point of interest, this is actually backwards. You're born recognizing all the sounds; what you learn is to ignore the difference between sounds that aren't distinct in your language.
You do keep that ability for the rest of your life, but it isn't helpful when you try to learn to recognize foreign sounds.
I don't know if "th" exists in Polish or not, but a common (perhaps dominant) spoken way to refer to "The Beatles" is[0] "Bitelsi", which not only loses "th", but also like half the other sounds in the name[1].
Thing is, we understand it just fine. More than that, if you overheard me saying to someone, "puść teraz Bitelsów" ("put on the Beatles now"), there's a good chance you'd identify the name from context. If you didn't, you could always ask to verify (well, not if you were actually overhearing me...).
----
[0] - Or at least would look like that written down. Polish is mostly a "you say it as you see it" language, but with foreign names, often enough people write the correct form but use localized pronunciation.
[1] - I'm sorry, I'm not a phonetician.
Unless they're bilingual from childhood, most people are not able to pronounce sounds outside their milk tongue without difficulty. That you expect English sounds to be perfectly pronounceable by non-English-speakers is probably more reflective of the fact that quality English education is widely available where you live than anything.
Him: Let's go see the Bate Hoffen Haus!
Me : Sure, to the Beet Hoven howse!
Him: Bate Hoffen!
Me : Right, Beet Hoven! Where Batch lived!
Yes, I am horrible.
There is another pronunciation if you want a holiday in New Zealand.
FWIW I tried many alternatives like "Bach classical music" etc to no avail.
It's to the point where I've given up trying to use Siri while driving.
* Almost nothing. I still have to say "play underground eight zero s on soma fm" because reasons.
In general I find that 80's and 90's era CD's ripped directly to FLAC still sound really good.
Then Siri had the gall to claim NO MUSIC WAS PLAYING as this super loud music was assaulting our eardrums. My wife thought my exasperated struggles were the funniest thing, it felt like HAL-9000 with the “I’m sorry I can’t do that Dave” moment.
As a Sabaton fan, I laughed out loud. Technically they have classic music sounding (roughly) songs, e.g. Christmas Truce, but yeah, that's a massive fail.
"Play music on dining room speaker." (dining room speaker starts blaring music at high volume) "Turn down dining room speaker." (No response) "HEY, GOOGLE. Stop music on dining room speaker." (dining room speaker music volume decreases) (from the dining room speaker) "Can't find dining room speaker." (dining room speaker volume increases, blaring music)
I did follow the advice here to rename all my speakers lowercase, since google home's VOICE interface seems case-sensitive:
https://www.reddit.com/r/googlehome/comments/jsadkp/i_unders...
And since the Google Home android app is, literally, the worst and least-reliable mobile application I've ever used, the voice interface is pretty much all I've got.
20% of the time it can't play songs on Spotify, and I have no idea why.
It also has a habit of invoking whenever I say "Hi sweetie" to my neighbor's dog.
For what it's worth, I think Alexa has gotten worse, but for different reasons.
It was called Ping for anybody wondering.
"iTunes Ping" or "Apple Music Connect".
Yes, they tried it twice.
Alexa’s inability to just answer a question and go away is why my son didn’t get in trouble for knocking it off its table (and breaking the top), and why we didn’t replace it.
I must have accidentally corrected "and" into "abs" once because now my iPhone always corrects "and" into "abs" when I use swipe gestures.
"Bob abs Katie are here".
Since I never notice it until I send the message, it's becoming so cocksure about the correction that there's no going back.
I think there was a dictionary you can reset.
EDIT: "Settings > General > Reset; Tap Reset Keyboard Dictionary"
on mine, at least. Apple does enjoy moving these things around from time to time.
Everything is a mess when I type.
I've started turning many of the autocorrect-related features off entirely.
I use it. I don't like it. (I haven't found anything else that's much better, and that's with a fair amount of SwiftKey use; nothing beats now-dead Swype.)
Routinely - routinely - I try to swipe out "and". Often, I get "abs" (I don't work out, let alone write about it), but the most common and bizarre one is "Abbas". The only Abbas I know is the Palestinian president, and I don't write about him at all, let alone enough to justify having that be a common word that comes up.
I realize that with put/out/or it's just not easy to distinguish. But I'll live with that. Abbas?
I assume they have some sort of special-case inclusion/handling for names in swipe dictionaries - it'd be embarrassing if your swipe keyboard recognised George and Donald as words, but didn't recognise Barrack.
And "Barack" isn't the most common spelling. I wouldn't expect it to know "Fillmore" either.
Shouldn't frequency of use matter? Why go to all this effort and not put some kind of weighting on its word choices?
I just set timers using the crown on my watch now, combined with custom google assistant commands to control what I need (lights, tv) through my Nest. Playing and controlling music is too much of an extreme sport for my taste on either assistant, and I've stopped using it for calls too as there's always a 5% chance it will call up some random person I knew decades ago but haven't removed from my contact list because reasons. The name is of course totally different from the few persons I do call on a regular basis.
It's great for joking around with my kid though, laughing at the misinterpretations and stuff like that. And that's about it.
"So we in the MacOs trading station, will push siri enable notifications on powerbutton wakeup, if you push the following answers on keywords up the likelihood.
Deal? Deal!
Thus she existed on, living long and prosperous.. through diplomatic victorys, that destroyed the qualities that could not keep her alive on her own..
When I am on the confort of my house, I want to use my native languages as much as I can.
well sure, not funny for the person actually going through it, but as the premise of a skit seems to hold some promise.
The most striking example for me is that the word "half" - as in, "Hey Siri, set the lights to half" - stopped working for six months, then started working again.
I don’t even attempt to talk to assistants in my native language because I know they’ll fuck it up. I just go straight to English.
Input recognition quality falling all over the place - it's very much noticeable with their onscreen keyboards as well. Some "intelligent" mechanisms know better which button I tried to tap and I'm getting gibberish even with auto-correct off. It's the same on iPhone and Watch.
Apple has already forced me to re-learn keyboards once - with the MacBook Pro 2017 fiasco when I had to start carrying external keyboard with my "mobile" laptop. Haven't bought a MacBook since.
Therefore, I have the impression that this is not a feature Apple would endorse much.
It's just less secure to use them than the one built into the OS because the third party keyboards might run input through some web service instead of keeping it completely local.
i would not for the life of me trust google with a 1st attempt at any hardware implementation. especially with one that will be pretty expensive
I remember being amazed by how great swiping was, and after using it recently (it's not really great on gboard or samsung keyboard either, not bad but just meh) I was wondering if it was just rose tinted glass. But nope, I booted up my old nexus 5 with a normal gboard (not even swiftkey!) and it was still amazing. The contrast was amazing even when I wiped typing data on both phones to make sure that it was a fair comparison.
I guess the most glaring difference was the subtle, but extremely important handling of edge cases or particularly ambigious letter combinations. Even the "bad" modern google keyboard is still 95% accurate, but the difference between that and the 99% accuracy on my nexus 5 basically makes all the difference. It goes from predictive magic to having to swipe across every single letter to make sure it works.
I remember not even knowing the spelling of words but being able to swipe in the general direction of letters I thought might be correct and it inputting the correct word.
Now now it seems I have to have near perfect tracing and pathing to get correct words.
It's very disappointing.
Note: the above paragraph was typed with swipe typing. I actually typed “Y O U” for both of the above instances of “your.”
Apple swipe typing is the opposite of AI: it’s like an idiot is going behind you taking even correct words you swipe and turning them into gibberish. Don’t even get me started about its obsession with “it’s” and “we’re” to the exclusion of the words without apostrophes. Ughhhhhh
I'm primarily a Windows wizard, I use my Macbook for specific tasks and it's not my daily driver. I can type on my Macbook mostly fine, but occasionally it misses some of my key inputs. I know the keyboard works, the key in question types in properly when I press it again, but nonetheless I have the occasional input go missing as I type.
I don't know why this is the case, it annoys me, and I'm left wondering if it's the keyboard with no obvious defects or my typing which works flawlessly with literally all other keyboards I ever come across.
Then again Teams specifically is just kind of the worst. At least they finally added the full range of emoji reacts to messages. (Still doesn’t beat Slacks custom emojis but oh well).
It's very annoying because it feels like I'm being gaslit by the device -- the errant results can pop in after some delay .... "was I misreading what I saw had been typed earlier on screen??"
The butterfly keyboard from previous Apple laptop generations is absolute trash. Every time it takes me a few minutes to get used to it.
Probably should be careful with "I am sinking!"
Wat are you sinking about?
Most false positive triggers stem from Audible books as well as audio play from the Apple Audio.
Sometimes I feel Siri is desperate to be triggered, because if hardly ever, I use it in the car when I have to change direction and need to set a new course on a Map app.
"as an ai language model, I don't know your location"
Has it really or have your expectation increased instead? Or is it because they initially only worked well with business us english and have been trained over the years to support many more languages, dialects and even variations of said dialets/language + slang and profanity?
Also at the beginning people where talking to these slowly, articulating every word. Now everybody take it for granted they should be understood and talk in their lazier and more natural way.
I've never activated speech recognition on any device I own. But last week I was in a videocall with my partner's mexican family and early in the call they were trying to make my mother in law's Amazon Echo to stop the music and it only really stopped when my sister in law started using profanity words, something like "no mames! chinga to pinche madre Alexa cayate!"
Apparently this stuff became so used/trained by people not using them in a polite way that they eventually only react when you talk badly to them using slang and profanity.
My 'favorite' Siri 'feature' is when I ask for directions to 'home' it gives me directions to the local Home Depot.... really???
I'm mindful my English pronunciation is not 100% accurate, but Alexa gives me no problem at all.
I’ve also noticed my autocorrect has gone bonkers. It’s constantly trying to change the case of the word “guess” into “Guess”, the brand I guess? Despite me never ever having shopped or mentioned this. The autocorrect has gotten very aggressive and I type so fast that it’ll take me three or four tries to get it to revert to lower case. It also has some weird context sensitivity to proper nouns they added so if I say “I guess James can come over” it’ll change that to “Guess James” like it’s a name (in iMessage only I suppose) and I have to delete that entire “name” and carefully retype!
It’s gone feral with punctuation, and things like “they’re” get changed to “there” or “their”. Common misspellings seem to appear when they weren’t typed.
If I spell or type out the address, it still adds the E, with no apparent way to get to my actual home address.
As a bonus, last night I said “cancel my 6am alarm” and it said “you have 29 alarms around that time”, and proceeded to read through each of them. My wife nearly died laughing as it started to rattle them off.
This isn't unique to Apple: my Amazon devices have definitely become slower to respond, and less accurate when they do, than they were a while ago.
I think part of the issue is that the companies have not found a way to “properly” monetise the services (my echo thingies where dirt cheap and I've never done anything with them remotely like making a purchase) so they are essentially throwing money at the infrastructure to keep them running due to the fear of the backlash if they just let the services die.
After too many frustrated attempts, I found a crude fix for people I call frequently - use the shortcuts app to set a single word to trigger that specific call. Use words that are hard to misunderstand, like "newspaper" or "fantastic". Silly hack but so far it's been working flawlessly.
Even basic stuff like changing the lock rotation can't be done with Siri. I just don't understand how it could be that bad. I feel like I could sit and code a better parser that would be more useful. And Siri was the first really big voice assistant, they've had 13 years to get it working.
- After four years it still doesn’t understand my youngest son’s name. I added a phonetic spelling to his Contacts card. I told Siri 200 times: “my son’s name is pronounced XYZ”’ I religiously corrected his name a 1000 times when text to speech misunderstood it. Nothing. Joke.
- Siri is triggered by anything that even vaguely resembles “hey Siri”: “…they seriously…”, “…ok see here…”, “easier”. And once that dumb piece of %$£~ is triggered she HAS to finish her cutesy “listen to me being a helpful and funny assistant” sentence. Again: sad joke.