This is my primary use case for Siri too. I use my watch or a HomePod to start named timers in parallel. Voice is also great for adding items to a grocery list, one shared by the entire family in Apple's Reminders app. e.g. When I notice the olive oil is running low, I can make note without washing my hands.

don't get me wrong, it is silly, but also being able to set a timer without touching anything with your gross cooking hands is unironically a wonderful feature.

> gross cooking hands

I cook a lot and totally get this feeling, but honestly your cooking hands probably aren't gross. And if they are you're probably doing something wrong, in which case some cooking classes will be both very enjoyable and eliminate the problem.

A cooking class won't eliminate the raw meat on your bare hand

Both of them? At the time where you need a timer?

You've never had to set a timer while cutting meat (which inherently takes two hands)?

You should be washing your hands immediately after handling raw meat.

With a voice assistant you can set a timer while actively handling the raw meat.

Either you don't cook much, or you have a much different definition of "gross" than most people.

A thread about Alexa is a good place to criticize a stranger’s cooking technique?

I mean I have a microwave with a cooking timer and it doesn't seem like a big deal to set a timer I can monitor.

I make bread by hand and "gross cooking hands" includes hands covered in shaggy dough.

agree with this and we're an alexa household, which I don't love, but we tried a homepod and friggin' siri was (still is?) shockingly inept when it specifically came to setting multiple timers, adjusting timer duration, cancelling timers, etc. it feels pretty dumb having Alexa and all the potential snooping just to set timers and for an inferior Spotify-playing experience (sound quality of the ones we have are not good), but... here we are.

that said, considering how much we rely on alexa for timers and spotify, what I really want is a homepod for the sound quality (if apple and Spotify would just start playing nice), privacy (yes, in a world with a lack of privacy I actually believe apple is basically our best bet given the ecosystem choices) and mostly for the potential of apple intelligence, which, if it worked as well as chatgpt today in "conversing" with you I'd be over the moon about.

does anyone else primarily interact w chatgpt via voice? it really does seem incredible how you can start with a superficial question about a topic and then keep digging down. it's replaced a lot of my information-seeking google searches, which I have never used voice with, with a voice app that I would use endlessly if I didn't have to open the chatgpt app and tap on the microphone button (that may seem crazy, but think of all the time you spend away from your phone, or like others are saying, with something in your hands, where you voice is the ui).

p.s. can't leave this comment without saying that, yes, I worry about the privacy implications of all of this stuff daily, but guess I'm dumb enough that I still use all of these privacy-invading devices

My Sonos Era 100s have the alexa integration and have my spotify account linked to them. You just gave me an idea!

... except, my Sonos Roam responded, and started playing. Not my stereo pair of era 100s on my desk. Let alone all the speakers in my house.

tried again. "I didn't find anything called "office speakers" in your music library". To be fair, she suggested setting up multi-room in the alexa app, which I suppose I could do.

ha, this is too typical. we have a super poor man's version of multi-room speakers (two shitty-sounding echos!) and whenever I try and throw the music from one to the other with a voice command Alexa just doesn't get it. I end up just going back into Spotify and manually tapping on the other room. of course now you have me fantasizing about having the sound of Sonos speakers; glad to hear someone has enough sense to optimize their music-listening experience.

Sonos Voice Control is better for any multi-room control, and it seems to work near flawlessly - probably because of the small domain it operates in.

Thanks for the tip, installing now. Combination of too many toys and being too much of a luddite means I never played with it. Or knew it existed.

> siri was (still is?) shockingly inept when it specifically came to setting multiple timers, adjusting timer duration, cancelling timers, etc

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this Apple AI leap will bring us a less stupid Homepod Mini so I can throw away my Alexas. It's almost 4 years old with zero refreshes, still running on the S5 chip from Apple Watch 5.

The only things we use our Alexas are pretty much: turn on/off lights in the room it's in, ask for the weather and timers. Homepods can do the first two, but the timers are pretty useless unless one is enough.

I like my Apple Watch for other reasons, but do have to admit that raising it to my face to set a timer or do a quick unit conversion while cooking is by far the most common "active" way I use it. I also use voice control a lot for music when I'm wearing gloves while working with greasy bicycle parts or when gardening.

An entire product segment for when your hands are dirty...

How does one need unit conversion while cooking? Sometimes I need how many grams is 1 dl of flour/oats (60g/35g) but I memorized that the second time, maybe if you are doing larger portions.

You answered your own question in the comment? If you require two instances to memorize it that means you needed unit conversion twice in cooking

Exactly. And given that there are probably 50 different common conversions you'll encounter in cooking, both between imperial units and between imperial and metric, not to mention common weight-vs-volume conversions of things like flour, good luck in not only memorizing them all but getting them exactly perfectly right every single time.

You mess up a single conversion and your finished baked goods go straight in the trash.

I do not understand how a voice assistant help with this, it has never worked for me. Seems like pretty hard things to do on the fly with recipes.

Weight to volume conversions are rare here but sure I do those on the fly so I guess it makes sense, do you really do you guys really do it that often? If you do extensive conversions of recipes you will need to get the ratios correct as well it is just not something I see myself doing with a voice assistant.

> I do not understand how a voice assistant help with this, it has never worked for me.

What do you mean it has never worked? What do you ask your assistant, and what does it respond?

> Seems like pretty hard things to do on the fly with recipes.

What's hard? I don't understand. If you need a quantity in unit x, but you only have a measuring cup or spoon in unit y, then you ask for the conversion and then you measure out that amount in unit y.

I genuinely don't understand the difficulties you seem to be encountering.

> do you really do you guys really do it that often?

Yes, literally all the time.

If I have a measuring cup that maxes at at one cup, and I need to add a pint of something to a pot on the stove, being able to say "Hey Jibble, how many cups are in a pint" and getting an answer would be pretty nifty.

As things stand, I walk over to the conversion chart hanging on the fridge.

Some people might just not want to take the time to math it out while they've got something time-sensitive on the stove. I feel like your comment doesn't really serve a purpose other than to put other people down. Congrats on your memory and math prowess but not everyone in the world has the same brain as you.

I wanted concrete examples, I see I could have been clearer on that point but I did not intend malice or to brag.

I memorize because of diabetes. You need to know how much sugar you eat so you do volume -> weight * carbs/weight * portion size to calculate how much insulin you are supposed to give for a meal. That is not because of cooking and having tried doing that with voice assistant several times I know it is hard to get correct numbers.

I have no idea how many cups are in a pint. I have no idea how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon, or how many tablespoons are in a cup, or frankly any of the other byzantine imperial measures.

The only thing I'm reasonably sure of is that there are four quarts in a gallon - and yet, I would only bet $10 on that, not $20.

I probably ask Alexa how many oz in cup or how many cups/oz in a gallon once a month but have yet to commit it to memory. I have no need to memorize this stuff when I have the internet available.

Everyone who routinely tries to cook American or British recipes, for example. It's all "tablespoons", "cups", "ounces", "fluid ounces" (whoever thought about naming that one deserves a special place in hell...) and whatnot.

And since that stuff isn't metric, orders-of-magnitude conversions (e.g. scaling a recipe up/down) become needlessly more complex as well.

> American or British recipes

American or old British recipes; ours are all metric now.

The exception is perhaps teaspoons/tablespoons, but those are trivial metric values (5ml and 15ml), so easy enough to scale and convert if you don't have the right measuring spoon handy.

That is probably it, never would have occurred to me. When doing international recipes doing a translation/conversion is not always straight forward. I cook a lot and often it becomes a investigation into the ingredients and what to replace rather than a simple conversion of units. Not something Alexa does.

It's a real problem for all countries not using the metric system, so, uhhh... the US, Liberia, and Myanmar. If the units have no meaningful way of conversation, like gallons, ounces, pounds, cups, and so on, cooking can get hard.

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I feel like there's an unmet market opportunity here for a physical timer that is voice activated without a connection to the internet.

Make it a microwave feature (I use the convenient timer on the microwave far more frequently than any other) and I could see it really taking off.

I'd hate to have it on another appliance because appliance manufacturers would love to have another avenue to get me to use their cloud-connected products.

We are a 'Google home mini' house - it's the same for us - timers/alarms, Spotify, radio, occasional weather checks, and even more rarely asking it to answer a question like 'how far aways is the moon' - while we are eating dinner together.

For all these purposes it is great not to get a phone out, and the speaker is far better than my phone speaker for sound.

Being able to have multiple, named timers that you can set hands free is my favorite feature of Alexa! I’m convinced that better timing for all of my recipe steps has made me a better cook and helped me make better food for the last few years.

I wonder how feasible it would be these days to create a single-purpose voice-controlled kitchen timer product, at a price the market would like? Sounds like it might do well... unless nobody needs it cause they already have Alexa!

But yeah, I think a lot of Alexa's get used mainly for kitchen timers!

Your iPhone can already do this.

I bought a kitchen sink faucet that has a sensor and you just wave your hand in front of it and it runs the water and wave again and it stops. It is such a good feature I never realized I didn't have. Dirty chicken hands no need to touch the handle before or after. Pump the soap with my forearm and clean my hands.

Id love to buy a voice activated timer that didn’t require an internet connection, but I’m guessing that once you pack in enough compute to do language transcription on the device you can’t help but stack on lots of other features and complicate the whole thing

Yep, it's these simple thingsthat are actually the killer features for me. Alexa is so cheap too (often given away free with other products like ring cameras) that I have them in most rooms.

Mainly I just use them as alarms, timers, a talking clock and for listening to radio. I occasionally ask it what time a local shop may close or similar.

For the little money I've spent on them I'm perfectly happy using them in such a superficial manner, they make life a little tiny bit easier and that's ok.

Maybe it's because I've worked in food service but if you have "gross cooking hands" you really ought to be washing them before doing anything else. I suppose that a voice-assisted timer could allow you to multi-task so you set it on your way to the sink to wash up, but I don't see how that's a big selling point. At least not for anyone who cooks in a kitchen that I would want to eat food out of. I mean, it's not solving a problem that I've ever heard anyone in a professional kitchen preparing hundreds of plates per service complain about. In that setting "gross kitchen hands" gets called a "potential health code infraction."

Let's say he's cooking lutefisk. It has alkaline, so he'd destroy the Alexa by touching it. But his hands are free of bacteria, so are they really gross? It might not be the health code that applies, but something like the ChemG:

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/chemg/BJNR017180980.html

my Alexa use cases are timer, music, news (sorta), weather. I also use "routines" for pranks form time to time.

I setup a routine that made it say "I heard that" at 630pm on a Friday when my MIL comes over, drinks some wine, and starts talking about the latest conspiracies her and her son have been discussing. Heh, Alexa blurting out "i heard that" in the middle of the conversation like it was listening all along worked like a charm.

I really enjoy this joke,

"Wow, my laptop is a really expensive clipboard today"

"My monitor is a really expensive webcam stand"

"My phone is a really expensive alarm clock"

It's never not funny to me

Tesla: Really bloody expensive outside thermometer.

(Via the app climate page, my Model 3 is in an detached-adjacent garage where zero attempt was made to insulate the gaps)

I have a HomePod that serves a similar purpose inside of the house.

It's a very old joke, by computing standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expensive_Tape_Recorder

haha TIL of the origin! thanks!

That's the thing, it's not very expensive! It's actually a pretty excellent price for what it does well. That's why so many people bought them and continue to use them.

That's partly because all voice assistants have a feature discoverability problem. People have generally no idea what it can do unless they ask. And if new features are added, they won't know about those either. But at the bare minimum you know it has timers and weather.

But a phone does the same thing.

I got an Alexa as a gift and never opened it

But now its finding a ton of use as a Cocomelon device for my toddler

I’m dreading the day she learns to say “Alexa, play Cocomelon”. It’s over for me the.

Set the wake word to “Computer.” It’s harder to say and will buy you a few months ;)

I already have that, it's my phone. I don't need a second device to respond to "Set a timer"

I do.

If my phone's in my pocket, it won't hear. If it's in my bag, it won't hear.

Or it sets the timer, but then a kid grabs my phone for something and leaves it upstairs were I won't hear it.

There's something to be said for a voice-activated timer in your kitchen that is always in your kitchen and never leaves your kitchen.

That the oven timer is oven adjacent seems a must.

the timer on my phone stay with me. put something in the oven for an hour, I won't be in tbe kitchen an hour later but my phone will be with me telling me to go to the kitchen

I use it as a timer and to control a couple smart lights. About 1 in 5 times I use it as a basic utility, it attempts to sell me something. I have nearly stopped using it altogether as a result of this unwanted behavior.

As an added annoyance, I moved states and it reports the weather in my previous location, despite repeated attempts to update my home location through the app. So I don’t even ask it the weather any more.

At one point it was the cheapest whole-home, multi-speaker audio setup on the market. But I use spotify as the music source.

None of these things generate revenue for Amazon, and their feeble attempts to do so run counter to the actual utility of the device.

The other really good use case, which I'm surprised to see more people don't use, is to use it to immediately add items to a shopping list when you're out (which doesn't auto-buy, to be clear).

Example: cooking, noticed the paprika is out, or in the bathroom, noticing the razors are used up. "Alexa, add to my shopping list..." My most used Alexa feature.

It probably wasn't for him. Maybe for Amazon.

A lot of Amazon engineers have probably gotten a hard kick in the face over Alexa though.

I love using my Echo while cooking in the kitchen. Timers, music, news. All great features while my hands are occupied and covered with chicken grease or whatever.

My Google assistant is 90%+ alarms and timers

This is 99% of the use of our kitchen Alexa (29€ on Prime Day, delivered). The multiple named timers are extremely useful.

I set up the smart home stuff once, but keeping it updated with the crappy mobile app is a huge chore, most of my stuff is in Home Assistant and HomeKit, which are a lot easier to keep updated.

I'm just hoping for a Homepod 2.0 so I can throw away all Alexas and replace them with Homepods.