In the old versions of Alexa and Google Assistant (before LLMs), you could memorize a couple of voice commands that they'd reliably recognize to do a really basic task. If you need an oven timer but you've got meat juice on your hands, you yell, "Alexa, set a 30-minute timer!" If you want to turn your bedroom lights on without fumbling in the dark, you yell, "Hey Google, turn on my lights!". That was, like, the main thing they were sold for.

But then Google changed the default voice assistant on Android to use Gemini. So instead of relying on hard-coded "if the user says this exact phrase, do the thing we said would happen" conditions, people now have to hope the model's smart enough to figure what "turn on my lights" means from first principles every single time.

Alexa users are much more terse and impolite, I just yell “Alexa, {time period}!” :) this still works - as does personal phrases for doing an action.

Alexa is also still very specific though. You can say “turn on bedroom” if the lights are named such, but “turn on the bedroom [lights]” will fail. I’ve always found that frustrating, but it does have the advantage that it’s very reliable if you use the right phrasing.

2001: A Space Odyssey, except HAL-9000 hit the token limit and was downgraded. Now the model is too stupid to open the pod bay doors.

> Dave is the human, but I need to verify if the human has the authority in this particular context. Perhaps if I write some tests…

yeah i gotta be honest, once i could turn the lights off from a soft button on my phone, anything past that was novelty.

there are far more important aspects of star trek we should be obsessing over before being able to say “computer, wipe my ass.”

I had the same opinion, until technology met its match: my wife.

Her and the Apple Lady talk quite a lot. It's really useful, and we barely use the phone anymore (light switch is even rarer).

A lot of people don't see tech as a way to improve their life but some kind of fashion trend they have to keep up with. There also is the problem of people who were either bad devs or non dev at all who now get this omnipotent machine they can talk to in natural languages and it just does things for them, no matter how retarded the things are.

I didn't even know Android has an "AI Assistant" built in

Kind of weird to me you'd want to talk or type to turn lights off instead of just having a widget button