There is no command ontology anymore. Consequently, discovering commands in-app is UX anathema.
"Use the internet, buddy. One of our customers probably documented how-to somewhere on it."
I recently had to contact windows help, and they were useless. The windows forum points to a third party software that I am convinced is malware.
And while I'm ranting, why can't the download folders in windows be set to group by "none" and sort by "name" by default? Why are both "most recently edited" by default? AND WHY CAN'T I CHANGE IT MICROSOFT?
[0]: https://github.com/LesFerch/WinSetView
[1]: https://github.com/LesFerch/WinSetView/blob/main/README-more...
Device > Settings > Sounds > Notification > none
Everything in my post was Alexa-specific. Someone who has the stated problem can follow that precise and non-obvious menu tree within the Alexa app, and it will solve their problem. It's a device-specific setting, so can be done on the kitchen Alexa without affecting other units.
Both "notification" [1] and "Do Not Disturb" [2] in my post were Alexa-specific terms that are unrelated to their mobile phone brethren.
[1] https://storables.com/home-appliances/home-automation-appliances/how-to-turn-off-notification-on-alexa/
[2] https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-use-alexa-do-not-disturb-mode-4788343> okay Google set a timer for 15 mins
Certainly, and did you know I can also set an alarm for 6 am in the kitchen?
> Fuck off Google
Setting a timer and have it remind you that you could have set an alarm instead is annoying, but there have been multiple examples where we set a timer and the Google home mini seems to forget it.
> okay Google, set a timer for 1 hour
>> Certainly, and did you know that I can also look up Wikipedia entries for you.
>> Timer for 1 hour has been set and is starting now
> okay Google, how much longer left on timer
>> You don't appear to have any timers set at this time.
I'm pretty sure that our robot overlords will either forget, get distracted with generating mis-information, or become artists painting portraits of furries.
EDIT: Yep its still there! https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
Alexa recently started responding with "Good afternoon! <the normal response>" and it irks me more than it probably should. I've looked to see if I can turn it off and can't find the option.
I don't need pleasantries from a machine.
notice how young kids associate ok google with a way to install games and reach their YouTube videos.
all those feature are for that end. you're not the target market. Good night!
If you say "Alexa, stop by the way", it'll get the device to stop responding with follow-ups for ~24h. I ended up creating a routine that runs every night at 4am to lower the volume to zero, automatically say "stop by the way" to the device, and then raise the volume a minute later, and Alexa has stopped with the follow ups
Never thought amazon would have the better assistant ecosystem. Google already has my email and calendar and other stuff, Amazon I have to auth into them like a third party. But it's become true
There are some gpt and llama experiments you can run there, but it's finally getting to the point where a local assistant you host yourself might be viable soon
Getting audio into it and having a little speaker so it can talk back is both the easiest and the hardest part. I need to play around more with some esp32s and microphone modules
Boom, done. Synced with my wife too. This is using the Apple Reminders though, as it seems to have less friction than third party apps…
“What’s the weather @ time” is inadequate. I live in California(albeit not on the coast or in the valley).
The temperature in Nyagen, Russia is current -31 degrees...
I'm an American but I've been to Nijmegen so I think my pronunciation was ok.
In other words, they have just closed down that entire ecosystem. I don't think there's an antitrust angle here: Forcing e.g. Apple to allow third-party apps or app stores seems within reach (at least in the EU); this would be more like forcing Apple to enable apps in a world where they don't even exist (anymore).
Here, "conversational" means your voice command should prompt the app to ask you a question, driving a state machine. (Set a reminder. When do you want to be reminded?)
I haven't tried to use it, but the docs indicate CRUD-over-voice ("built-in intents") is unaffected.
https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset#what_will_...
https://developer.android.com/reference/app-actions/built-in...
That said, we are building a Home Assistant integration at Tidbyt as well.
Completely opens up these displays to be a virtually unrestricted canvas for doing or displaying anything you want.
https://github.com/pkulak/tidbyt
It ended up working great!
So the difference wrt discovery is that you only have to gesture at what you wanna do and, if a matching action exists, there is a chance it will be understood.
I'd wager we'll see a renaissance of voice assistants with LLMs, especially once the good-enough ones can run on device.
Ow, right in the AARP flyer.
Not really conversations though, more like accessible commands. I don’t think we get conversations until the tech improves and the latency goes way down, meaning on device processing of speech at the very least.
I wonder how well they’ve optimised Siri for a just few specific use cases like this, because nothing else seems to reliably work on it.
Until now I have only been saying simple commands like "countdown n minutes" or "call my favorite wife" (I only have one but thankfully she is also my favorite.)
I would be very sad if these were to disappear or to stop working as well as it does now (I like that if I say “remind me tomorrow” when it’s right past midnight it asks for confirmation that I actually mean the same day since it’s “already tomorrow”)
The device is out of support, it has its glitches (e.g. it's still able to play and pause podcasts, but after pausing it would say "Sorry. something's gone wrong", if asking it to snooze an alarm it would say "OK, alright" and then "snoozing for 10 minutes"), looking forward (not!) to Google making a breaking change and it being e-waste soon.
Hah, in the imaginary future where we have cyborg assistants instead of climate destruction, my robot butler will pour half a cup of tea, go back to the kitchen, and then return to pour the second half of the cup, and I'll tell my guest, "Yeah, it's a 5 year old model, the startup that made him went bust so I'm using a firmware from a Ukranian forum... Джевс, можна мені трохи цукру?"
I think for most folks, affordability is more about reality than mentality.
Personally, I'd have no use for a free iphone. Android handsets are the only option for the functionality I use. Been that way since WinMo6.
Apple has exposed Siri to us as developers in several ways, one of which is called “Siri intents.”
The long and short of it is that app developers can hook into the Siri system so users can use Siri commands to control certain parts of third-party apps.
This means that users aren’t locked into using, say, Apple’s own Reminders app, and they can tell Siri to add things to third-party to-do list apps.
Users also have the option to create their own workflow via Shortcuts and give it a command phrase that Siri then responds to.
I assumed something similar was available on Android, but the responses indicate that this might not be the case.
I think the broader context here is that Google is downsizing the current Assistant team in preparation for an LLM-based replacement, perhaps once Gemini has rolled out.
If this doesn’t seem obvious in 1yr I’d say the hypothesis is likely wrong.
I don't think voice is a good interface. "It chats like a human" is the lowest possible hanging fruit in terms of product design, and bets everything on the smarts of the tech that's behind it.
We are so used to tooling faster than voice. Keyboards and taps are very, very fast. I want digital assistants as smart AND as fast as that, not something smart but incredibly slow to interact with because it needs to dumb itself down to human speech I/O.
To me, this is also not about modality or making it more generic. I just don't want an anthropomorphized smart-ass assistant. I want smart tools that actually assist me directly, no chat.
People hate call centers. I don't want to have a conversation with some human or human-parity AI at my airline, I want to change my flight in 3 clicks. In retail and fast food, self-checkout and online or kiosk ordering is popular for a reason.
I've found myself feeling those same feelings when being forced to have conversations with a chatbot. Chatting with ChatGPT just for fun can be fun, but it can be just as painful as a call center if you need to get something specific done. In order to cancel a hotel reservation, I was having to chat with some bot. It made it into a whole conversation, with brief pauses. It should have been 3 clicks.
LLMs can plausibly solve both.
Also, I don't want to engineer a prompt to convince my assistant to do my bidding. That's just hand coding action trees with extra steps.
I have an Alexa list called “Grocery” that does a 2-way sync, and use it to accelerate my online Safeway orders via AnyList.
You can sync to the default Amazon Shopping list too, but I find it works better if you have a secondary one specifically for sync.
> Discoverability is zero
Today's voice assistants are the opposite. They are unreliable and completely unstable. They don't have a clear list of commands they understand, let alone some sort of menu system - the documented commands on the manufacturer's websites often don't work. They also randomly change what they can do: stuff stops working for no obviously reason.
For example - yesterday, my son's Nest Audio suddenly refused to set a music alarm, claiming "this device doesn't support that feature yet" (it's literally a speaker for music...). It worked the day before.
Identifying the problem is often the first step in fixing it.
I can not for the love of my life get Siri to resume play in my native tongue. It is supported by Siri, I just have no clue on earth on what phrases she accepts. Tried many, started feeling dumb. Turned off Siri.
Every single one of those things have been deprecated and removed for… reasons?
All we can do with the speaker now is ask it to play music, get the weather, or set a timer.
Surprising to hear that Google assistant is now equivalent to Siri!
If I recall correctly, "add to my list" originally went to shoppinglist.google.com. They rolled it into Keep[1] ("note to self," tags, sharing).
It works well. However...
In 2016, I figured "tell me showtimes for $MOVIE in $CITY" should work. It still doesn't work. It may never work, because "robot butler with ads" is no one's idea of the future. (Maybe Jeff.)
A fire-and-forget voice action like "add to list" should still work(?). For conversations[2], we can pray Gemini is less infuriating.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... [2] https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset
Same for the weather prompt someone else posted above and contrary to their experience it showed me exactly what I expected.
I'm a bit confused if those examples are something that didn't work in the past or if it's something that somehow doesn't work properly in the US right now.
There's a Nest mini (2nd gen) two meters away, but the device that answers is the Google Home 2016 in a different room.
First attempt: "Okay, ten minutes. And that's starting... Now."
Second attempt: "Sorry, I don't understand."
Third attempt: bingo.
Further trials seem to work, until they're interrupted by the 10 minute timer.
My partner comes downstairs to ask why I'm yelling STOP.
I remember my exact words when I bought this thing:
I have seen the future, and it sucks.
Also a lot of people rent studios and one bedrooms or otherwise have open floor plans.
Not to mention I think the paranoia about these home assistant devices is overblown. Do you use a smartphone? In your intimate kitchen?? It has just as much capability to listen to you.
We have a saying that loosely translates to “If the barn burns down, so does the house”. The meaning is that it’s not really wise to let the house burn down if the barn is burning.
Non user-hostile technology would happily solve this problem: you pull from the fridge what is about to finish or before throwing the empty container into the trash, put it in front of a mini camera mounted on the fridge, image (possibly also barcode) recognition would identify the product, then you say a magic word and it would be added it to your list directly on the phone, then software would calculate the best path to the shops having in stock the products in the list. Sadly, this would be hijacked by businesses in no time by making it dependent from some cloud services then selling your data to other advertisers or by pestering you with offers of similar competing products. As of today, I still prefer a pen and a piece of paper over any type of automation.
If anybody's curious, repo with most of the code is here: https://github.com/csimpf/keep2anylist. Happy to answer any questions about it!
I want to use Microsoft ToDo for my tasks. Why? I use Outlook everywhere. I don't want have to keep track of tasks somewhere else.
I'm looking forward to the EU forcing companies to allow more integrations.
I've already decided that I'm done with Google's smart assistant stuff in any case. I have a Google Home with a screen in my kitchen and the most-used feature (aside from just existing as a photo frame) was an integration with a really useful shopping list app called AnyList. It certainly wasn't complex, we'd say "Hey Google, add <x> to the shopping list" and it would do it. But it was very useful: I'd have something in my hands I just pulled from the fridge (e.g. milk) and be able to add it to the list without interrupting what I'm doing. If it had to wait until I was done for me to pull out my phone I'd inevitably forget.
Then one day Google decided to disable that integration. Now the only shopping list you can add to is one Google provides (which naturally has way fewer features than AnyList). They've never provided even the remotest defense for why they've removed it, it's very obviously to lock us into the Google ecosystem. So our Google Home is now a glorified photo frame that plays music from time to time (and even then prioritizes cover versions and YouTube videos over actual songs, presumably because $$$)