As a Google employee, I really don't want to be saying "Ok, Google" in my home all the time. It's totally possible for me to go to work in a subway that has Google ads, waste time on my Pixel, work at the Google office for eight hours, waste time on my Pixel, walk past the same ads on the way home, watch YouTube videos and do Google searches about random topics, and ask Google to set an alarm before I go to sleep. It's too much. :)
"OK Google"/"hey Google" is one of the reasons I went with Amazon's products instead! (other reasons include that they seem to understand my voice more reliably than Google or Microsoft's systems). I get to call it Computer instead of Alexa too, though if I were stuck with Alexa it would still be preferable to Google (or Amazon for that matter).
It's isn't just branding though, if I'm right. The wake word needs to be something that is easy to pick out from a complex audio environment and not be a regular part of common speech so cause confusion (computer fails a bit in that regard) so allowing completely custom wake words might cause reliability issues. Also some might choose wake words that the brands don't want to be seen listening for: I might choose "slave" as a Blake's 7 reference for instance but that could easily offend some if they overhear, and there are many other epithets, slurs, and swears, that would not be deemed suitable either.
I do seem to recall that being able to set a customer wake-word was in the works at one point.
I don't see why the system could not be designed such that one could submit a wake-word, which is analyzed for suitability in terms of being sufficiently distinct in complex audio environments, and then checked against a blacklist.
Shouldn't be beyond Google's technical capabilities.
The thing is, a LOT of people avoid Google Home/Assistant because they simply can't bring themselves to blurt out cheesy branding like that.
They really ought to solve that problem. Probably they will right about the time they port Inbox bundling to Gmail and provide a Drive sync client for Linux (it's been, a decade?).
Why is this a problem that needs solving? If the user chooses an ineffective word they'll figure it out pretty quickly... and if they choose an offensive one-- that's on them.
They could also walk around saying offensive words when not addressing the computer.
It wouldn't be a problem if all people were decent and rational.
Unfortunately some would reprogram other people's devices to cause offence for a jape and some will get offended and blame the company for letting it happen.
The difference from Google/Amazon/Apple/MS's point of view is that if I run around yelling the N word and their device doesn't even notice then they can't be seen to be complicit by unreasonable people. It would just be me being an arse.
Heck, some would get offended at the possibility of one of a company's devices responding to loaded words like that even if it never actually happened.
Of course there is another reason: having people use the same word re-enforces brand recognition even if the wake word is not the actual brand just a word/name people associate with it.
I'd prefer it be treated like passwords - upon installation, you should change the default immediately.
I refuse to use a service that requires me to say its globally recognized name so often I will probably become brainwashed to it. And then there's the older hacks with TV commercials that took advantage of those defaults, and the (cooler) hypersonic transmitted voice command attacks, or the ones delivered by vibrating the device's microphone with a laser, etc.
None of these attacks would have worked if the product trigger wasn't so predictable from the get-go.
Eventually even Raspberry Pi stopped using the default pi/raspberry default combination. How we invoke our voice-activated programs should be treated with equal care.
This reminds me of the great Sci-fi book series "Old Man's War", where the soldiers get a thought-controlled computer called "Brain Pal™" installed in their head. After installation they first have to choose a name and almost everyone uses a swear word for that. The main protagonist then keeps activating it with the phrase "Hey Asshole".
I'm pretty sure that this book came out way before Google Assistant.
I'd also add their insistence on using the same branding approach for experimental apps as their core offerings. A new app named `Google $RandomNoun` has a really high chance of being killed a few years from now, while `Google Search` and `Google Maps` don't. I'm sure the company wants to use the same structure to give new products an initial boost, but they seem weirdly indifferent to the long term damage it's doing to the overall brand.
So, I can't find the reference googling it now, but apparently Jeff Bezos really wanted Alexa to be called "Amazon" (pretty similar to Ok Google).
I think he didn't want to dilute the brand, and have the association front of mind or something, but the people on the alexa project managed to convince him to go with alexa instead (as it's confusing, and arguably a better name).
I think that's part of the reason for the different wake words, one of which is amazon (though the confusion with people called alexa is likely a much bigger one. It's probably why they have amazon in that list at least).
Very interesting. I can’t help feel the irony given Alexa itself was a brand Bezos acquired* in 1999 to get in on being a Search Engine just when Google was on the rise...
I can hear it now “We finally have a use for that brand we spent all that money on..”
Agreed. And I have a small child. I _really_ don't want them to be forming "relationships" with brands by asking robot assistants named after corporations to do stuff.
This is what has led us to stop using our assistants around the house. I have 4 of those little google pucks around the house that we used for various tasks and automations. Now that we have a 1-year-old we almost never use them because I don't want him learning the phrase "ok google".
It sounded dumb enough for two adults to say it all day, but the convenience was worth it. Having my little one start using the phrase to talk to things is definitely where I draw the line.
Besides, now that it tries to make suggestions after every other command all you really hear in my house in regards to them is "hey google shut the fuck up and do what you're told". Unfortunately the stupid puck doesn't allow you to interrupt the unsolicited FAQ any longer.
Come to think of it, I think I'm getting rid of most of these things this weekend.
My Alexa really needs a way to whitelist commands. I bought it to be a wireless clapper and fancy alarm clock. If it thinks I'm asking it anything outside of those two domains, I am not.
Of course Amazon isn't likely to ever do such a thing, because god forbid we don't have the ability to suddenly order something from Amazon on every device at all times.
> Of course Amazon isn't likely to ever do such a thing, because god forbid we don't have the ability to suddenly order something from Amazon on every device at all times.
Comically, that's actually one of the things its the worst at. I tried to do it exactly once and swore I would never do it again. In the time it takes to read the first search result, I could have found and ordered what I want from my phone. If that's what they were going for, I can't believe they didn't scrap the project.
Supposedly they're fairly good at re-ordering, but given how often Alexa mis-hears me, I'm not a fan of doing anything involving money on it.
That's interesting. The Amazon devices can be configured with a wake word of "Alexa", "Amazon", "Echo" or "Computer". I see Google offers no way to not say "Google".
We have kids too. We use "Computer" which is one of the wake words offered by Amazon because we don't want our kids to get used to the idea of bossing around a person.
Also, I've mapped all of the functions we use to "recipes" that include the word "please" so that they don't work unless you use the word "please." i.e. the upstairs lights are named as for example "the Chicago lights" and there is a recipe that says "turn on the Chicago lights" when someone utters "Computer, please turn on the upstairs lights." So if you say "Computer, turn on the upstairs lights" it says "I don't know what upstairs lights are."
The disadvantage of this approach is that you need to get the string exactly as stored.
Most likely, everyone you know, especially outside of tech, when referencing a search engine, says to "google it".
There are, unfortunately, millions of ways we form relationships with brands. A brand's reason for existing is to live somewhere in our psyche either subconsciously or consciously. We say "Q-tip" instead of cotton swab, "band-aid" instead of bandage, "Advil" when we need ibuprofen, or "Tylenol" when we want acetaminophen. When we see white polar bears around Christmas time, we think of Coca-Cola, and so on and so forth.
All that to say, kudos for you for taking a principled approach, but I am not sure it's going to achieve much.
I think you can trigger Google assistant by using "OK Boo Boo". It works on the Google Home and on my Android phone, and is actually easier for toddlers.
Just wait (a few years, perhaps) until you buy or rent that sweet new self-driving car and try to get out of town for some rest and relaxation... you turned off the radio, but that doesn't matter, because Big G uses the windshield as a billboard looming into your personal space, beaming ads to the most captive audience that exists.
The future is now. Already my local gas station has a screen that starts playing ads the moment you start pumping gas. The mute button on it is broken from being pushed too many times, too hard.
Last year my parents rented a room at a 5 star hotel. The hotel had a smart mirror and I only ever saw that mirror play ads. It's insane.
The insistence on making the spoken interaction feel as "human" and "natural" as possible honestly introduces way more confusion than it needs to and makes the whole thing feel uncomfortable for its parasociability and stiltedness.
In Star Trek they were perfectly comfortable saying "Computer! Do the thing" in a more specific, 'computer' intonation. It was all fairly natural language, but there is no attempt to pretend the computer is a person. This made the thing feel more futuristic than what they're trying to do now.
It's not even that natural; with a new baby in the house I've really grown to dislike Alexa just for how much I have to yell at it. We're not a loud household, but talking to Alexa is like talking to my grandfather without his hearing aids. Everything has to be said at least three times, in increasing volume levels.
I just rewatched all of TNG, and that's actually not the case: there are several instances where a crew member (often Geordi?) would speak to the computer in a more "human" conversational way. I recall one episode in particular where Geordi's trying to set the mood in his quarters for an impending date, and he's very conversationally refining the music choice until he gets what he wants.
Yep, Star Trek computers understand addressing, the conversation is modal: one does not need to begin every sentence with the keyword, a first use of the hotword (or implicitly in some cases, like entering a turbolift) combined with a specific tone makes the computer “open” the conversation. From then on, tone only is sufficient for the computer to know when it is being addressed. With a conversation opened, context is remembered.
I am flabbergasted that the following hasn’t been an option:
- hey Siri
- yes?
- what are the last three releases from <artist>?
- X Y and Z
- search again without EPs
- W X and Z
- Play the first one
- <playing W>
- thank you Siri
<conversation closed>
Also, with attention tracking that -already- exists with the FaceID array, the phone can know when it is addressed and when it’s not. You know, just like when you’re talking to someone, you usually look at them...
As someone who recently acquire a Clapper... I had forgotten just how finicky it could be. Can't clap too quietly, too loudly, too slowly, or too quickly. Often takes me three or four tries! Not exactly an enjoyable experience for the person sitting next to you...
I vaguely remember a sitcom where someone had to watch a important event with friends on TV and someone else installed a clapper on said TV. Everything went well until the applause kicked in.
Yep. "That sounds like a clap from the next room" versus "that sounds like a quiet clap in this room" is not an impossible distinction to make (humans could do it most of the time), but not trivial either.
It's experiences like this that make me question why anyone would spend this much effort and money setting up a system that isn't as good as what it replaces.
I have a convenient, quiet, perfectly reliable single-bit computer on the wall in every room in my house. It costs $1, can be operated by a 2 year old, is perfectly intuitive, and the only downside I can think of is that occasionally it necessitates I be very slightly less lazy than I might otherwise be able to aspire to, i.e. when I need to go downstairs and turn off a forgotten light.
Considering my house is all using LED lights on hydro power, it's probably better for me to just leave a 5w light on all night than it is to install a Google Home setup here, in terms of my carbon footprint.
That is the key point, for me anyway. "Computer, all lights off" instead of getting out of bed when I've left something on is one of my lazy wins from voice control. Setting multiple timers without touching things with messy hands while faffing in the kitchen is another.
-- is Google misinterpreting your voice? E.g. does it hear a sound it thinks is "play" in the middle of your phrase?
-- or is it some weird statistical model that because of invisible and irrelevant correlations, sometimes concludes it's more likely you're asking for music? Like the song with that title is currently in the top 40, or was played by you in the past, or something?
-- is it because you don't speak with a 20-30 year old white male techbro bay area accented voice, so Google never even bothered testing whether it'd work for you?
(My brother in law is Australian living in the US, and has to use his "sarcastically fake American accent" to be understood on the phone. He, more politely than I, calls it his "phone voice". It's the same voice all my friends here use when parodying American stereotypes... I bet it works on Ok Google too.)
You really don't think Google doesn't test in other huge markets? A study a couple years ago found that Google did awfully well with English speakers from the US, India, and China. [1]
From a quick search, it looks like national accents are less of a problem, and the real difficulties like in dialects and foreign accents (e.g. a Spanish person speaking English).
But the idea that the training corpus used for speech recognition models is all "20-30 year old white male techbro bay area" guys is ludicrous. Where are you even getting this? Speech corpuses used for testing are put together by people who take demographic diversity seriously. On the other hand, they are sometimes biased towards a single mainstream national dialect. (E.g. "standard" American English, as opposed to a thick Boston accent.)
I feel like the true spirit of Google is that they test fifty shades of blue, then apply the "quantitatively best" shade of blue in an unrelated product where it makes the text unreadable. Either that or I have no idea what the heck they're testing for.
I strongly suspect that was an example of malicious compliance.
Googler #1: "Marissa want to change the link colors _again!_ What can we do to make her stop micromanaging shit like this?"
Googler #2: "All we need to do is convince her we are obviously wrong about 'graphic design-y things' because we're developers, and that she can prove we are wrong by making a 'data driven' decision. Then we'll say 'The only way to prove we are wrong would be an insane global 0 way multivariate test of all possible colours!!!' and she'll _insist_ on it. Then we build a tool and run the test and point at the results every time she tries to make us change it again. And we can offer to run the tool for _everything else_ she micromanages us about in future too!"
Googler #1: "Brilliant! So, do we build the tool and run the test? Or just make up the results and present them to her?"
For any company Google's size (including Google), it's rarely ever accurate to say "$COMPANY does $X". Maybe some parts of Google quantitatively tests everything, but it is safe to assume that there's huge variation across the company in testing rigor.
> From a quick search, it looks like national accents are less of a problem, and the real difficulties like in dialects and foreign accents (e.g. a Spanish person speaking English).
Can confirm, in high school I had to occasionally go AFK after being beckoned talk to the amazon echo because it wouldn't understand my parents' accents.
A lot of immigrant children get used to translating for their parents, but repeating commands but with a native accent is a newer phenomenon.
Settings > Siri > Language > English (United Kingdom)
not fix it for you? And possibly setting
Settings > Siri > Siri Voice > British
as well?
Apple advertises:
> Since Siri is designed to recognize accents and dialects of the supported countries or regions, Siri’s accuracy rate will be highest for native speakers.
Or is this problem just with American friends' devices?
If that were true then maps will stop working for anyone traveling to another country. I know that's certainly not the case on Android, and I suspect it's not on iOS either.
The new Android 11 power menu screen has been a life changer for me. I now control my lights with my phone 90% of the time since it's literally one power button click away, and I always have my phone on me.
It doesn't work with hue lights, so it's worthless to me. Besides, I just have a on/off widget on my home screen which is faster and more reliable than holding the power button.
Oh, good to know. But then it wants me to create a Hue account and link that with Google... which I don't really want / care for. So I'll be sticking with my widgets.
My fucking Google Home can't even figure out how to play the auto playlist "My Likes" on YouTube Music.
Previously, I could say "Play my Thumbs Up" and it could do so on Google Play Music.
It keeps playing a song called "My Likes". Jesus fucking Christ, Google. If I say "Play my My Likes playlist" something random happens.
Do these guys even use their product? I'm just glad this album didn't come out before the forced migration.
EDIT: Okay, I went to verify it and this has to be the best instance of massive PEBKAC plus some UX donkeyness. The auto playlist is called "Your Likes" so I can get the Assistant to do the right thing by telling her to play her likes (Ok Google, play your likes). What the fuck man. But fine. At least I got it working.
I've suffered with this for months and now I find a solution in the few minutes after posting this.
This is my experience with any 'smart assistant' product that is or ever has been.
It's always frustrating but never particularly hard to find the special incantation that will invoke it to do the thing that you want it to. Overall though it's simply not worth the effort which is probably why I end up using these overwhelmingly complex devices only for their most mundane functions like timers and getting the weather.
Trying for anything moderately complex, and I might as well be asking the dog to do it for me.
My issue is that I found out the special incantations two years ago, and then they changed (I presume) something about the core language processing logic, and now none of that works.
For example I have Philips Hue lights behind the TV/Screen on my living room wall, and I use their "color loop" behind the screen when watching movies etc. The problem is that "TV", "Television" and "Screen" are semi-protected words, so "turn off tv lights" ends up with the TV being turned off 9/10 times. "We" compromised and those lights are now called "screen wall" lights
As for setting certain lights to "the color loop", what used to be a 90% success rate (the other 10% turning my lights to "the color blue/bloo(p)") will now set the lights of the room I'm currently in to the color loop, which is usually the living room, not the screen wall. Also as recently as this summer I used to be able to set the whole house to "the color loop" this feature recently disappeared. The color loop slowly and nearly imperceptibly fades the colors from red to green to blue etc over several minutes. It's technically part of "hue labs" but it's a "beta feature" that's been available in the product now for over three years so I would argue it is core functionality at this point.
Yeah, my experience is related, in that it seems to think "lamp" and "lights" are synonyms, so I have a lamp in my living room, but "turn off the living room lamp" turns off all the lights in the living room, not just the light called "living room lamp." It's like, at this intermediate level of intelligence that's particularly annoying: too smart to just literally use the names I assigned, but not smart enough to actually intelligently apply synonyms or fuzzy matching. Worst of all possible worlds.
Siri (HomePod) was getting confused with my “turn everything off” incantation, so I’ve changed the name of the ‘scene’ and now when we leave the house we instruct her to “PUT THAT COFFEE DOWN”.
I had to laugh out loud. I suddenly envisioned a future where we slowly developed an arsenal of such workarounds for the flawed automation creeping into every aspect of private and public life, where it reached a point where people just accepted that that's the way things are done. My grandchildren naturally yell "put that coffee down" when leaving the house, because that's just how you turn off everything. Sure there must be some ancient reason why it's exactly that phrase, but who cares? That's how smart people decided AI is supposed to work.
“The Hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy” had a great bit on this in 1979, describing gesture-controlled televisions that randomly changed channel unless you sat perfectly still, etc.
I used to be able to ask Siri: "Hey Siri, please set the lights to green." Then she would obediently set all of the lights to green. Nice, that's my favorite!
Then a few months ago some update was pushed (iOS? Apple Home app? Philips Hue app? Philips Hue Basestation OS? No idea) and now that exact phrase (which has worked for two years) suddenly elicits a response: "OK, which room?" -- followed by a listing of the rooms in which I have devices and a catch-all "Everywhere".
So now I've had to change my incantation: "Hey Siri, please set all of my lights to green."
I'm just waiting for her to start asking "Do you want Lime Green, Aqua Green, or Vomit Green?". Or worse, maybe she'll just give up and say "OK, here's a list of Google results for Green Lights." Maybe even throw a captcha in there asking me to select the green lights at intersections, just for good measure.
Some people claim I live in a cave and green lights match the season. I just thought I'd play the part. Maybe I'll try red next week and see how that goes.
/s
Actually, I set my living room to red because that's my favorite. And I set my dining room to blue because eating is cool. And when you gotta go then just look for the green light in the hallway in front of the bathroom. And my office is definitely purple in the morning to show just how much I want to punch things because I have to work. It's pink in the afternoon because pink noise from the freeway shouldn't be limited to sounds.
At night I set all the lights to 15%. With the colors it's dark enough to not be blinded when I want some water from the kitchen but also bright enough to see the contours of the door knob or kitchen table or dining chair so I don't stab myself with any of the corners while walking blind.
I love the fact that I can call out any X11 color name.
For working during the day, my office lamp is "banana mania". For dinner time, the dining room lights are "topaz".
You can also set a light to a color manually, then ask Siri what color it is. (This is how I discovered "banana mania" which is Siri's name for the color Hue calls "concentrate".
Ahh well I would say that while Philips Hue (name brand) does work well, it is too expensive for the value provided -- by about 2x to 3x. If they were half their current price then I would recommend them to affluent friends and family. If they were a third their price I would recommend them to even the less affluent friends and family. Even then it's significantly more expensive than a plain light bulb (even LED ones) but for that you gain colors and ease of remote use.
I have some colored lights from Eria that have about as good color spectrum and integrate with Zigbee base stations. They were about 1/2 the price of Philips Hue. But the downside is that they don't integrate with Apple Home. Apple Home (and Siri) only recognizes the expensive Philips Hue lights even though the Eria ones are connected to the same Philips Hue base station. So with the Eria lights I just change the colors manually with a third party app on my phone.
And as a bonus as a developer: Philips Hue has an API to work with the devices connected to the base station. It's super fun to tell coworkers about a script that sets my lights in the office (and visible in video meetings) to red because the server in the living room is having trouble. ;)
They're pretty expensive too especially considering the warranty is pretty short. From their warranty[0]:
> [...] this device will be free from defects in material and workmanship and will operate for 2 years and 3 years for Energy Star certified products, unless a different period is stated in or on the packaging of the product, based on up to 3 hours average working time per day/7 days per week, when used as directed
I don't really know anyone who only uses lights three hours a day, especially when it gets dark pretty early during winter.
Yeah, I like my Hue lights, but they are quite pricey. Part of the cost is that are calibrated well, though. If you have a mixture of white temperature and RGBW lights in one room and set a scene, they will mix decently.
I get this trying to make reminders to add things to the grocery list with Siri. Siri always intercepts it and says "There is no 'Grocery' list. Would you like to make one?"
But I already have a grocery list and a process for it. I just want a reminder to add something to it.
My brain can easily misplace the thought in that time. Especially if I run into problems or am frazzled. I usually just open a note app since it limits the risk of a memory-shattering distraction.
Same here. I really wonder how these products sell. The most basic things dont work. And if they are confused, then for real. For about 2 years, when Siri happened to misunderstand the command "Call ..." it would answer "OK, calling you" and actually try to call my own number. This is so weird that it actually feels like someone wrote that piece of code to prank the user.
If these things would actually work, I'd definitely use one regularily. However, whenever I visit an Alexa owner, I realize after a few interactions that I really couldn't be bothered with this stuff.
I think the "taxi" problem is still around with Siri. Put any taxi organisation into your phonebook, and include "taxi" in the name. You will likely not be able to call it with siri, since it insists to search for taxis in your area. Its always the same bug. These things have absolutely no idea about the context. And some hand-crafted rules go haywire after a while, because apparently nobody reviews them. When I got my first iPhone (iOS 5) I put in my date of birth during configuration, and promptly noticed that the german speech synthesizers says Nineteenseventynine when I enter 1979. All aother 4-digit numbers are fine, only 1979 is pronounced english. So apparently someone put this exception in there for a completely bogus reason, and it stayed there. It is still there today, after 8 years.
Because they’re currently better than nothing. My HomePod works 90% of the time. I can create specific scenes for the things she can’t quite figure out.
Being able to walk in to the kitchen and tell her to put the radio or the light or a specific album or a timer on is actually really amazing. Most of the time. Certainly amazing enough to suffer the times she doesn’t want to co-operate, because then I just do that myself which I would have done anyway.
It helps that the HomePod is also a great speaker in its own right, and that it’s one single cylinder with one cord. It’s a very tidy device.
Well, I have a Sonos One SL, so I know why you like the HomePod form factor. but I explicitly got the SL version because I really dont see any use for a voice assistant. I think the success rate of playing specific artists or tracks might be related to how mainstream your choice of music is. In my experience, the success rate is very bad, actually beyond useable.
The only use case I see which has an acceptable failure rate is asking for the time and setting a timer. And even asking for the time fails about 1/10 times with the Alexa system my gf has in her flat...
And if asking for the time is the only thing which works decently, well, that is really telling about the state of the art...
A UI with next to zero discoverability and an incredibly broad input set ("all speech") must really work for most conceivable inputs, or only die-hard enthusiasts will keep trying.
> It's always frustrating but never particularly hard to find the special incantation that will invoke it to do the thing that you want it to.
not always. I used to use google play music to play music from my own library in the car. any time I asked it to play a moderately obscure artist, it would interpret that as whatever popular artist had a similar name. it would then play the radio station for that artist, since I didn't have the premium subscription. I found some success with spelling out the artist name letter by letter, but even that consistently failed for certain names.
also sometimes I would say "list albums by X" to help me remember the name of what I wanted. no matter what I tried, it would only list three albums "and others". who could want this behavior? if I ask you to list albums, yes I actually want to hear every single album name!
I'm now paying for YT music (since the free version apparently does not support android auto), and it so far it works flawlessly. infuriating.
Yep. Google has been getting progressively worse at recognizing my words over the past two years. It's also started randomly capitalizing words that aren't proper nouns and seemingly has a blacklist of words that it clearly recognizes as speech but refuses to type such as "o'clock".
"Take a look boss, I made the AI better yet again! After the last change, telemetry shows our users are talking even longer to the assistant each time they use it. Engagement is up, they seem to love interacting with it."
And whoever decided that the Google Assistant "clang!" sound needed to be the loudest, most piercing sound physically possible to generate with a smartphone deserves to be drawn and quartered.
This is the same way I feel about Google Maps. Especially with the new streamlined/cards UI. Everything is objectively worse and I can't even force it to act like it used to. Actual, useful functionality has just been lopped off.
> It's always frustrating but never particularly hard to find the special incantation that will invoke it to do the thing that you want it to.
I think magical incantations is a perfect way to think about it. Using voice assistants feels more like the land of Harry Potter than the land of technology we live in. It's the flipside of “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
It's like someone took the maddening random guesswork user experience of mid-80s text adventures, mixed in mediocre speech-to-text and decided to base an entire product category around it. I absolutely do not get it.
I think we need something extremely close to AGI for natural interfaces to work.
Similar story for self-driving cars: car driving helpers/assistants (lane keeping, etc.) are ok, self-driving cars will be a huge disaster until we are really close to AGI.
These are the things where getting 80-90% there isn't enough. We're smarter than chimps or other animals because we can cover the long tail of events.
My toddler wants to hear a song 1000x, I can't do something like "Play 5 little monkeys jumping on the bed on repeat or in a loop or 10x" I have to tell it each time.
yeah but what happens when they want to listen to surfin bird on repeat the next day and banana phone on repeat the day after that? awfully clunky workflow.
I don’t even bother using them for timers anymore since it’s usually easier to do it on my watch. Voice assistants are limited to navigation requests while driving for me
It's all just a big charade from these companies, as if they ever work. Billions of dollars made from devices that don't even work, but people buy them because they've been lead to believe they work. They're worse than useless, because they give you hope that they actually do what the companies say they do. What a sham. Maybe in another 10-20 years.
I can't understand why I should talk to any of my devices as long as they are as idiotic as they are now and like you describe above doesn't have the slightest idea about how to handle context.
That said Siri feels at least 100 times smarter than Google assistant to me, the below are actual (if somewhat anonymized) examples:
- Google suggestions when I look at the phone at 5am in the morning: "text random friend of a friend that I answered a question for over Telegram" or "call customers project manager". See https://erik.itland.no/tag:aifails for screenshots and more examples. In the years I had access to the future it maybe helped me twice by pointing out it was time to leave for an appointment.
- Siri suggestions are mostly mundane (more or less predictably tells me when to leave for appointments, kids soccer and hockey training etc, suggests picking up kids at kindergarden - although not consistently, suggests sending messages to my wife over our preferred messaging solution, tweeting, or if I drive 5 minutes down to the shopping center: that I should drive home the way I always do etc) but I have never caught it suggesting outright idiotic things like Google, and once this weekend it even suggested something semi-smart (a text message to my wife that was surprisingly close to one I could have written myself to tell her I was on my way home, including one of my rather unusual abbreviations and with good timing :-)
I agree. Google is collecting all of this data, but every time I'm going to Wegmans, "hey google, navigate to wegmans", its always, "I FOUND SEVERAL OPTIONS, WHICH WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO TO?". And in what is apparently always a surprise, I always want to go to closest Wegmans.
I know how to get to work, and yet I enter it into my satnav every day because it then avoids traffic.
TomTom had this solved eons ago - my TomTom 5000 from 2014 automatically sets destination as work when I get in the car in the morning, and home when I'm done with work. And it learns my schedule per day, so it doesn't do that on the weekends, or if I need to pop out somewhere at lunch. Such a simple feature from 6 years ago works better than anything that Google can seemingly come up with.
That's what Android Auto does in my car as well-- as soon as I turn the on the car on a weekday morning, it gives me directions & traffic to work. Ditto for the commute home.
I remember back in ~93, my dad told me that the Mac we had just bought had voice recognition. He warned me -- quite jokingly -- that he had to be careful not to say something like, "mynameisash, please empty the trash" because the computer might hear it and mistakenly delete items in the trash.
Almost 30 years later, how many orders of magnitude faster silicon and countless person-hours of research and I can't get my damn phone (which, yes, _is_ a marvel that way-back-when-me wouldn't believe) to recognize, "call mrs_mynameisash" when I'm using my hands-free while driving. I don't know how many times Google's voice assistant has called some (possibly local?) T-Mobile instead. And my wife's name sounds nothing like "T-Mobile".
One of the funniest video on YouTube in my opinion is this 2007 demonstration of voice recognition on Windows Vista for Perl programming. The lad spends the first 4.5 minutes trying to enter „open (INFO“ before typing it out. Absolute classic.
I remember, when I was a wee little lad back in '96, playing on an old Mac Plus with a black and white screen. Even then we had software installed that would let us control the old Mac Plus with our voice. It was the first time I'd ever used a boom microphone.
My dad insisted that a boom microphone was required -- not just any microphone but a "boom" microphone specifically. It was interesting when I showed him some smaller microphones years later that worked better with less noise.
Oh man have I grown since. Hardware and processing power have both grown so much. But speech recognition is still as dumb (or even dumber) as it was 30 years ago. It certainly didn't need the internet to work back then!
Since half this thread gives workarounds, and since I had the same problem, I'll share my workaround: you can tell Google that a particular contact is your wife. There's a "relationship" field in contacts. Now I can say "call my wife" and it mostly works, although saying her name is still hopeless.
Google is terrific at answering random questions compared to Siri, though. And I use my Alexa products for shopping lists. Not too long ago they added a feature where it tries to figure out what section of the grocery store things are in, and then it groups items on your shopping list into those grocery store sections. It's pretty nice and a simple "alexa, add <whatever> to my shopping list" is pretty bulletproof.
I tried the same and got frustrated. So I said “Siri shut up you piece of garbage” and she added “shut up you piece of garbage” to my grocery list for me. Very helpful.
Also Siri is constantly having problems knowing if I’m talking to my watch or my iPhone, even if my phone is in my pocket.
> Siri is constantly having problems knowing if I’m talking to my watch or my iPhone...
Funnily enough, this is one issue I don’t have: between my phone, watch and iPad I’m consistently impressed at how well it manages to choose the best one - does anyone know if Apple devices actively co-ordinate which one responds to Siri commands?
I don’t use Siri for much, and I certainly don’t have it always listening. But I did hack out a useful Shortcut to record my blood pressure and heart rate to Apple Health.
I say, “Add blood pressure <pause> 120 over 80 plus 60.” Then I use the shortcut to parse the string on the / and +, and record it to Health.
The hard part was finding delimiters that Siri would consistently record as a single character. That and realizing I needed a manual review step to make sure Siri didn’t happily pump garbage into my logs.
when i was a working chef, i used this NON-STOP. it is actually the first real “tech” i’ve ever brought into a (real working) kitchen that provided real value instead of gimmick
I miss the days of instruction manuals. Alexa has always (?) supported concurrent timers but it wasn't until recently that it started asking me if I want to name my timers. But it tries to be "smart" and only ask me when it thinks I need to name them.
I only figured out through trial and error that I can name my Alexa timers without waiting for it to prompt me:
> Alexa, set a pasta timer for 10 minutes
> - Pasta timer, 10 minutes, starting now.
> Alexa, cancel pasta timer
> - Pasta timer canceled
Alexa is mostly good with timers/alarms, but occasionally will swap 15/50 or 8/80.
If you miss hearing the distinction in the confirmation, you'll miss the scheduled event
Edit: They also have distinct classification of alarm/timers. You can use either word to create one but checking what you've set or trying to cancel will result in 'no timers/alarms' set if your request doesn't match their system design.
I've had great success with the Google smart speaker with "Hey Google, turn off the Living Room TV".
I do have to specify "Living Room TV", even though the speaker and chromecast are configured to be in the same room, it still just turns off a bedroom tv if I'm not specific about which tv.
Also "Hey Google, turn off the Xbox" works, because I linked that at some point.
There's a setting in Google Home where you can alias which TV a given speaker is paired to as its default so you don't have to name the TV. If you have a device _named_ TV, that goes out the window, though.
Google Assistant on my phone just got better at handling timers.
It used to do a cheesy "Starting your timer.... Now", which would have been okay if a bit tedious repeatedly, apart from the fact that actually you could see that the timer started immediately, so the whole delayed "now" thing was completely misleading.
It was like that for well over a year until I noticed it was fixed just recently.
It used to be like this for me too. Recently I can‘t use siri anymore when the ventilation is already running. After I said my sentence it keeps listening to the noise forever until it gives up, even though it understood my first sentence perfectly.
No joke, this is the one thing I use my Echo for: as stuff is cooking I set timers for each of them and it works perfectly. It does virtually nothing else well but it's a fantastic keeper of timers.
Fine, you can also say "Set a timer", pause for a hot take, and then say "four minutes" and it's fine. I just tried it and it worked without any issue.
Me: Hey Siri, add tomatoes and grapes to the shopping list in Pap-
Siri: I couldn’t find a shopping list, do you want me to create one?
Me: no. Hey Siri, add tomatoes and grap-
Siri: you have to select which app you want to continue <shows 6 apps, including Paprika. I tap Paprika> Sorry, Paprika has not implemented this function yet.
I use Google Keep for that :). Share it with my wife, we both have the widget in our phone desktops (or whatever the home screen is called). Works very nice.
Oh, God, I have a google apps account on my phone, along-side my regular one, and I once spent three days trying to debug an issue where OK Google had become super-crippled, only to find out it had somehow switched to using my other account.
I don't use it with OK Google, I just type the stuff. All I need to do is unlock the phone, swipe right to the next home screen, click the giant widget and type.
> You bring the whiteboard to the grocery store with you?
I take a photo with my phone. It's not perfect because to mark things off you'd have to use the photo-editing on the phone which would be rather clunky for that purpose. But it works if you don't mind checking things off in your head.
> How do you keep it from getting erased?
I've got a glass whiteboard and use liquid chalk markers. It's tough to accidentally erase something with those.
I built my own with a raspberry pi, touch screen, and tiny webserver (on Hetzner). It doesn't use voice. It works perfectly in the kitchen, and perfectly on my phone while shopping.
I've been wondering whether I should re-enable siri and give it an other shot. I use the todos app for that and from time to time it would be convenient to do it handsfree.
I see that I still have no reason to bother, it's going to frustrate me more than anything else (especially with how downhill voiceover has gone in 12).
Basically the main use of Siri for me is lighting---it isn't so bad at setting HomeKit lights scenes---and, with recent shortcuts capability increases, hitting external APIs.
The latter point is a bit broader: now that Siri can hit an arbitrary URL via shortcuts, you can really just set your own trigger phrase to do anything that can be automated. You better believe I have a raspberry pi on order which will be running a local webserver...
May as well just give it a try for yourself and see how you get on. I use Siri all the time to build shopping lists, set reminders (including reminders with alerts), etc. I have no problems with it. I also have no problem issuing the exact command parent poster is having trouble with.
We have a HomePod in the kitchen and its (in my experience) pretty flawless. I empty the milk and I just say 'Hey Siri add milk to the groceries list' and she says 'Ok, added to your groceries list'. If I mumble or stutter things can go off the rails. Also inline editing of my statements causes problems (like where you start saying one word and realizing its the wrong word and swapping it mid-sentence)
I also never have issues and, based on the replies, I'm wondering if the Homepod is the difference. It seems like people using the Homepod as a hub have better luck than those just using their phones.
I was with you until the end. I use Reminders lists that are shared with my wife, we have many many lists for different things. They sync to all my other devices so they're always within 2 seconds of reach. But yes, Siri really can't handle all this, I have to manage it "manually."
I wonder what the difference is. I not only am able to add stuff to my Groceries list 100% of the time but I also have multiple shopping lists so I can say "Add x to my Amazon list" or "Add x to my Costco list" and never have an issue.
My wife and I use Google Keep + assistants and they work fabulously. We have different lists: Costco, Amazon, Home Depot, Grocery, Alcohol, and the only time we ever have issues is when one of use says the wrong thing.
Maybe ask her “What did I say?” At least on iPhone, she’ll show you the textual version (and let you type to modify it). Because it sure sounds like she isn’t understanding the word “Groceries”.
My wife and I have been using an app called Todoist(no affiliation) and have been loving it. Groceries is a shared list either of us can contribute to or check off of at any time.
I don't use any of these "assistants", but curious if you responded with "Groceries List"? Knowing they work on keywords, to Siri, you may not be actually answering her question.
I have endless frustrations with Google Assistant / Google Now / Whatever they call it now. A few examples:
1. I have my phone set up to trust bluetooth in my car and unlock my phone. I get in the car and say "okay google, open spotify" -- this is so that it will continue playing what I was listening to before I left work.
"Okay", she says, and then tells me that she can't do that because my screen is locked. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it does not.
2. When I had Google Play Music it reliably would play random sub-par covers of songs rather than the original, even when I specified the artist.
3. Sometimes it decides to rely on screen input instead of audio controls. I can't do that while I'm driving.
4. It sometimes ends voice input too early or does voice input inconsistently. I've sent messages to my wife saying "I'm on my way home exclamation point" instead of "I'm on my way home!"
5. Commands which have worked for months suddenly stop working.
6. Sometimes my screen stays on, forever, after asking to play music. (OnePlus 7T, Android 10). This does not always happen.
7. Google: "Here's your message, send it?"
Me: Yes
Google: Sits there for a moment and pops up the results for "Yes" in the assistant.
My biggest gripe isn't what it can and can not do. It is the inconsistency that drives me up the wall. I am not a heavy user and most of my requests are because I wish for it to be hands-free in a car with bluetooth audio. I'm sure that this is a harder problem to solve than just me interacting with the phone, but it is a common use case.
> 5. Commands which have worked for months suddenly stop working.
This is my biggest gripe. Whatever magic voodoo ML they use is inconsistent, and it's not clear what level of abstraction this inconsistency is happening in.
What I want is the reliability of Google Assistant's speech to text parsing, combined with a firm, customizable interface. Something like If This Then That, where there are some default commands with a clear reliable command pattern: "send message to George Orwell, we live in your book", and commands can be added.
Either that or you are part of some random A/B test which made some change to the command. I've always wondered how much A/B testing contributes to the inconsistencies in Google Assistant, and other things like Chrome or Netflix
I'm sure when I had an iPhone 5 I had reliable skipping tracks and sending text messages via Siri when driving.
I use Android these days, but have stopped even attempting to use voice control when driving for all the reasons you've mentioned. It does almost feel like the functionality has gone backwards in recent years.
I don't even bother trying to use any sort of voice commands while in a car unless I'm stopped and the radio is off. Road noise makes voice recognition an impossible task.
5 seconds after sleep, except when kept unlocked by Smart Lock. For Smart Lock, I have "On Body Detection" as well as a trusted Bluetooth device enabled.
Part of the disconnect here is likely how I am understanding "Trusted Bluetooth Device". I likely have to unlock it once while paired with that BT device, while the text says "$DEVICE_NAME unlocks this device when nearby".
This is a very interesting theory, I don't know if this was revealed somehow but considering how consistently terrible the guesses are on assistant devices... I wouldn't be surprised.
Why would a live version of a song pay less royalties than the studio version? Similarly for the instrumental version. The only one that seems like it would pay less royalties is maybe the cover, if the cover band has a weaker royalty rate with the provider.
I think the far more likely explanation is just that these home assistant products suck.
My assumption has always been that Alexa, Assistant etc. just have really naive sorting of results - if I search on Spotify, the song results for 'War Pigs' are returned with the album version second, but I know that's what I meant.
Because the studio version is a top 200 of all time album, and the live version from the 50th anniversary "Still Kickin'" Tour with 30% of the original lineup and 20% of the original vocal range?
YTM seems to prefer youtube over their music catalog. It's not hard to extrapolate from there. Wouldn't a live cover recorded and uploaded by some random person pay less than the official version from WB?
This is a larger GIGO problem with the music industry these days. It's not a shortcoming of voice assistants in particular. Ever use Spotify? Sometimes it seems that 9 out of 10 albums returned by any given search are live versions, heavily-doctored remastered editions, or remix collections.
I have a friend that works for one of the major assistants not made in MountainView... there is explicit logic where it looks if the song title includes "live | cover | instrumental | etc" and tries to find a new version.
Think of the assistants as young children. As a reference, someone I know spent some time in Miami with his wife and 2 young kids. After some time, the young son told his dad that he wanted to go back to "yourhammy". The dad eventually decoded "yourhammy" was the kid's interpretation of Miami as My-hammy. Your Likes => My Likes reminded me of that story.
That is a great story. Honestly, I do intend to treat smart assistants that way. I can accept that they're imperfect and that they're tools that only work in certain ways. I can figure out a way to either make them be useful to me or abandon them if the way is too hard. I'm not asking for perfection.
The thing is predictability, though, and maybe handling the common use cases. It gets frustrating when they get worse. Kids, on the other hand, only get better at understanding you (though perhaps also better at frustrating you on purpose).
To put it simply, I'm happy to make myself perform incantations. I'll say "Ok Google, grooblepuff the bonkman" to get the thing to do the thing. This whole thing has made me understand why wizards and sorcerers chant Accio! and Sectumsempra! and shit like that because if they just said "Bring me my firebolt" no one knows how the AI that runs magic in the world would interpret that.
And you know someone who feels this strongly about the product is pretty bought into it. Like, if I didn't use it so much, I wouldn't be complaining this much.
Regressions in language understanding are common when children are acquiring deeper understanding of the rules of that language. For example a kid may start saying 'letted' for the past-tense of 'let', even if they had used it correctly before.
I think children are probably at least as smart as adults, but are missing assumed context on almost everything. Maybe the same is the real problem with smart assistance?
This is what I was thinking. If you stop a second to think about it from their perspective, it can make more sense. (I know in 2020 it is unheard of to think about something from a different point of view than one's own.) Even real-life human beings in the assistant role get things wrong as they interpret the original request not as intended.
In that case maybe the assistants should be more like children and like ask questions?
Relatedly, I wonder if these assistants “filter bubble” you like search does. Like, learning what types of things you are looking for and grouping you with other similar people.
I believe current evidence is that children grow both intelligence and knowledge into adolescence. After that, it's mostly knowledge. i.e. both compute and data grows for quite some duration, then it's mostly data.
About 16 years ago, I worked in the IBM Solutions Experience Lab (with the smart kitchen and living room and stuff). One thing I did was to set up the "smart car" simulator, which connected with IBM's cloud stuff at the time, including their voice recognition. I'm testing this diddly-bob and say, "Turn on headlights." The simulacar honks its horn. Loudly.
Unfortunately, there was a tour going through the lab at the time. Some VPs from some company got to watch me honk the horn and then bang my head against the desk.
In the last 16 years, the state of the art has not advanced, as far as recognizing my speech goes. It still don't work.
Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
The concept is named after Ward Cunningham, father of the wiki. According to Steven McGeady, the law's author, Wikipedia may be the most well-known demonstration of this law.
Cunningham's Law can be considered the Internet equivalent of the French saying "prêcher le faux pour savoir le vrai" (preach the falsehood to know the truth). Sherlock Holmes has been known to use the principle at times (for example, in The Sign of the Four.)
It's not until just now that I realized the irony inherent in my reply. What the person I was replying to did was to "post the wrong answer", and I was uncontrollably impelled to enact the very phenomenon I was describing, completely unaware I was doing so.
Whether unintentional or not, it has put a huge smile on my face.
BTW, the entirety of my post after the URL is simply quoting from that page. I would have liked to have remembered to put ">" in front of those paragraphs so it was clear that I didn't write all of that, but c'est la vie.
I find that usually having a second set of eyes when you do it again usually forces the person to focus, whereas when it wasn't working before they probably had something else on the brain or were on autopilot. I like to call it the IT magic touch or job security.
In a previous job, we used to joke about having a life sized cardboard cutout of the lead engineer left in the head end. Things would not be working "nominally" to the point we needed help. As soon as the engineer would walk in, the erratic behavior would stop. We joked that the equipment only behaved that way when he was not in the room. We wanted to test the theory to see if the equipment knew him or would be fooled by the cutout. You know, for science. Nobody was vested enough to actually pay to have it done though.
Most "Ok Google" assistance feels like a gimmick to me, but here's something very simple I'd love to have working:
I watch a lot of YouTube on my phone when cooking, I even built a cardboard stand for my phone for this reason. What I want is for YT to respond to these voice commands:
- Pause video.
- Play video.
- Rewind 10 seconds.
- Skip the (expletive) ad <-- ok, I can understand why this one might not work.
Sadly, this doesn't work. And it's the only voice assistance I really need :(
I've been playing around with a Nest Hub Max, and with that you can pause/play a video by holding your hand like a stop sign in front of it. Kind of gimmicky, but occasionally useful.
Was also curious about your use cases on the phone (aside from ad skip), and they actually worked for me. I'm using a pixel 4, though wouldn't think that'd make a difference.
"Hey Google pause/unpause youtube" and "Hey Google skip/rewind 30 seconds on youtube" work on my android phone. So I don't know why you say it doesn't work.
YTM is completely worthless if you have/had a family plan with GPM. My kids basically lost all of their access to music as Youtube itself is not available to kids, no matter how hard you try or how often a parent enters their password.
In classic Internet tradition, you basically need to setup a shadow Google account where you lie about their age and add them to your family account anyway. Thanks Google!
Wait til you discover that the web version of YTM can't chromecast. Yep, Google's own music product can't communicate with Google's own music player product.
The "solution" is to cast the tab. Which means lower bitrate, no music controls, and if you cast to a display device, the whole tab screencasts etc.
I guess it's because nobody important uses the web anymore? Or something?
(Disclaimer: I work at Google. But not on YTM. Most Googlers I know have switched to Spotify, including myself.)
It really has. Google Play Music integrated so well with everything. YT Music has the massive advantage that there is so much more music on YouTube but damn, the integration is shambolic.
Yeah but Gmail is one of the easiest things to leave (if you have your own domain). There are high-quality alternatives and moving is a half hour of work.
I thought the same but it literally doesn't work for me. Just tried it. It plays something random. I tried it on my phone to see what it was doing and it picked "my supermix" once and the song "my likes" the next time.
Outside of setting a timer, I've kinda given up on voice commands.
My tolerance for mistakes for simple commands that work sometimes / are the right command ... but don't work is ultra low.
Like how is it my Android phone will default to just googling "exact valid voice command letter for letter" (it's used in a commercial for cripes sake!) ... and not somehow notice that?
If you take a look at recent neural net papers for dialogue and question answering you'll see amazing things. It is really mind boggling they don't improve the commercial product, maybe it's still too expensive to run for the general public.
Similarly, they say English language Search is powered by Transformers. But when I want to perform searches it often switches the intent to something wrong. It's a blunt tool, not a precision instrument.
Given how they killed off Google Play Music and foisted YouTube Music on us, I have to conclude that Google hates music and wants to do everything they can to ruin the listening experience. It's as if no one involved in product design has even a passing interest in music.
When cancelling my YouTube Premium subscription one of the exit survey questions for "reason for cancellation" was "Unhappy with the YouTube Music App." So clearly there's some awareness of the unpopularity of YTM out there. However while it specifically asked about the app, whereas the real problem is the whole YTM service/experience on all platforms -- in particular the web app. Hopefully the cancellations and the survey results percolate to the right people.
"AI" (quoting since we aren't there yet) will have to deal with what Melanie Mitchell calls "the long tail problem" before we'll accept it as AI - https://youtu.be/NMUqvhuDZtQ . While she gives instances such as "how is an autonomous vehicle supposed to distinguish between a flock of birds on the road versus a small snowman versus a kid versus a rock versus a small animal.. all of which would warrant different responses, if the system can only respond if it has seen this stuff in training before." (paraphrasing) .. and she brings up the example of Teslas getting confused by salt lines laid prior to snow season. (I'm in India, so I wouldn't know such things were done either.)
With natural language and speech interfaces, we face such long tail problems too .. like the Burger King ad triggering a whopper lookup via "ok google".[1]
Come back home from work, I frequently say "Ok Google, text Mary 'home in 10'", only to be told that it can't do that because it doesn't have a "Home" number for "Mary."
I have to re-do it with "Ok Google, text Mary 'I'll be home in 10'", and growl a lot on the inside.
Reminds me of this voice command skecth I've watched recently (careful, loud): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n-GAd33jew
Especially, since the problem wasn't the voice command in your case.
Conversely, I've been pleasantly surprised at how well voice recognition works with weird song/album titles nowadays. "Hey Siri, play 'Zombie by the Cranberries by Andrew Jackson Jihad' by AJJ on Spotify" works exactly as intended.
The assistant has gotten markedly worse at finding music since the home devices came out a few years ago. Songs I used to be able to find by describing vaguely it can now no longer find at all, and it gives me random indie artists for songs I actually know the title og unless I literally spell it out (and even then, it often fails). Woe be to you whose desired song only exists as a Youtube (but not Youtube Music) video. Something behind the scenes has changed, and it's just another reason never to trust Google to maintain their services.
It feels like a trope to even say it but it amazes me how badly Google have handled the transition from Google Play Music to YT Music. For me YT Music is an inferior experience in every single way.
When Google Play started a "radio station" based on a song, the songs that came after were changed on each iteration based on your likes/dislikes. Maybe they just shuffled the same list each time, but it kept it feeling fresh. When you ask YouTube Music to play a song, the same set of songs will always come after. Not very good for similar song discovery.
One big annoyance for me is that every song I play now shows up in my YouTube history. For me, watching videos on YT and listening to music are activities I do in two very different contexts, mixing them together in a list serves no purpose and makes it a lot more difficult to navigate.
And on mobile GPM had a very simple functionality: a playlist containing all the songs you've downloaded offline. To the best of my knowledge YTM has no such thing, just a playlist _it makes for you_ of offline songs.
They moved my favorite songs to one of my THREE youtube profiles.
They couldn't move it to my main because it was legacy, but that was where I had youtube premium/red whatever. So then I needed to switch between accounts. Not fun while you are driving.
Oh then they stopped premium so I started hearing ads. Not what I want when I'm trying to calm my screaming kid in the car. Oh, and I need to keep my phone screen on.
Many of the songs aren't the same as on Google play.
Google seems to be moving toward search/email/YouTube. With few other products. Probably good, they can't handle it.
Realisticly, how many of the people working on Google Voice, Siri and Alexa do you think try to use their own service as much as possible day to day? Because just like you, I think it's evident they simply don't. They build for others, not for themselves, and they miss the point 50% of the time.
What we need are people building interfaces for themselves, not people building interface they think are good for others.
Apparently the new brand for speakers and displays with Google Assistant is now "Nest" -- as far as I can tell the Nest Mini and Nest Hub are the same hardware (?) as the Google Home Mini and the Google Home Hub. (And the "Nest Audio" is the new version of what was the original "Google Home".)
If you view the “Nest” brand as a thermostat brand, it doesn’t make sense. But if you view it as a “smart home” brand, it makes sense. However, rebranding to a different product name never makes much sense. It just confuses the public.
It's taken me 10+ attempts to get Google Home to wake me up to a radio station on weekday mornings. Even with the alarm supposedly set, it works maybe 30% of the time, so I end up setting alarms elsewhere too.
I'm astonished at how badly it works compared to Alexa, but sadly, Alexa no longer supports alarms via BBC Sounds, so it's not an option for me.
When Bart, Lisa , Maggie and Marge were at the Mt. Useful Visitors Center, Bart went to a statue of Smokey the Bear. Smokey said "Only WHO can prevent forest fires ?" Bart then pressed the You button and Smokey said "You pressed you, referring to me, that is incorrect. The correct answer is you."
This used to really irritate me. Microsoft called folders things like “my pictures”. The awkward personalisation seemed so gross (I used a Mac). However Spotify’s “Your likes” is even worse, it sounds more like big brother giving me temporary access. I’m not sure how I ended up fixating on this.
I'm still surprised these things have become so ubiquitous. I remember thinking "these things will never catch on", but they caught on massively in spite of their flaws. I guess the ability to do an action without requiring hands is such a powerful draw that it outweighs all the pain that comes with it.
It's probably obvious that the only way these services would get improved is if they actually made money. Alexa is constantly being improved since it's a vector for revenue. Siri and Google Home and Cortana are tinker toys for engineering and R&D.
Google Play Music was so trash but I stuck with it because I had too many tracks sent by friends/my own on it (which Google Play would randomly delete altogether at times).
When they forced the transition to YouTube music, I gave up the service for good.
the google assistant is getting objectively worse and stupider. It worked better a couple years ago. The thing I hate the most about these opaque, closed box systems is the absolute dependence I have on them. I can't just freeze the version of software I'm running that is working. Nearly every app I have that works great, will at some point stop working and regress. Almost universally that is true. I despise the new era we're in where the user has zero control over what is running on their hardware.
Haha, I've lived a life that ranges from lacking toilets to living for free in beautiful apartments owned by movie stars. Trust me, I know my life is great.
But the way I see it is that any Google Assistant PM is going to see this for what it is: someone who is angry because they love not because they hate.
My wife used to always says "Hey Google Play Smooth Jazz" when we got a google home, so since it was hooked up to my spotify, I made a new playlist called "Smooth Jazz" that simply contained "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley.
I don't think they did. Rick Rolling is fairly common- the commenter you replied to suggested "Careless Whisper" in addition to the Rick Roll because it would be a careless whisper that would cause the Rick Roll to play. They were adding a layer to the original joke. At least, that's what it seemed like to me.
Dear Google/Alexa/Cortana/Siri product managers in the streaming audio space, here is what we actually want:
* "never play that song ever again"
* "add <artist> to my blocked list"
* "set the plays limit for Baby Shark to once per day"
* a feature that prevents interpretation of any phrase leading to the same result, if the response to that result led to a "stop!" or "for fuck's sake!" within the next ten seconds. i.e. stop doing the same incorrect thing over and over again if it's clear that it's not the desired outcome.
* "play that song I said I liked a few days ago"
* "shuffle my favourite songs"
We don't want to block explicit lyrics, some of our favourite songs have swear words in them. We want to block entire artists who are simply awful.
We don't want you to get the song wrong and be forced to yell "stop!" until you shut up. We want to make it clear that not only was that the wrong song, we also never want you to ever think it could possibly be the right song.
We want the magic of our kids being able to play their music on demand, but without the headaches that come from kids being total assholes most of the time.
We want you - our voice assistant - to assist us, not provoke us to rage.
You've made a useful tool. You've made a fun gimmick. But now it's time to make it a pleasant experience, because right now it just plain isn't.
Google has responded correctly to "never play that song again" for me in the past. Same with "hey google, fuck this song". I don't know if it explicitly "downvoted" the song or not, but the song was immediately skipped and I hadn't heard it any time soon after.
That said, I've refrained from using my google puck in recent months and it had been regressing pretty heavily when I did, so I can't guarantee that still works.
Yeah, I'm sure some providers do support some of my feature requests here. But definitely not a single one supports all of them (or I'd have moved to it!) Amazon Music, for example, supports this blocking only for songs in their pre-built playlists. It's little constraints like that that contribute to the frustration.
- stop giving me suggestions. Alternatively, don't give me the same suggestion again within a month of the last time you have it to me.
- you've got the weather, that's great. Now stop repeating the same unwanted information (the current weather) when I ask for multiple forecasts (what's the weather for tomorrow and Saturday -> the weather tomorrow is... Currently it is... There is a weekend advisory in effect...The weather Saturday is... Currently it is... There is a wind advisory...)
- let me specify what information I want when I ask for the weather; it should be trivial to get the wind speed, UV index, it whatever other item I want every time I ask for current weather or forecast, not just if it's going to be unusual.
"OK Google" is the biggest problem I find with Google Home and Google Assistant so far.
Things like "Alexa" and "Siri" are short and seem more practical. When I say "Ok Google", I feel like doing a mouth-exercise. And multiply this extra effort over the number of times you need to apply it in a single session. It is a pain.
This was an option on the Moto X second generation phone. I have no clue why Google decided to remove the feature of setting the wakeup phrase, but at the time they were actually touting it as an upcoming feature (I guess to get me to upgrade my phone).
So being forced to say ”OK Google" is actually a regression from previous capability.
I’m no language expert but the difference I can notice is the word Siri comes from the tip of the tongue and feels a lot easier than google where G comes from the back of the mouth and is more awkward.
And Google Assistant doesn't? We quite often (~once a week, minimum) have our Home mini trigger off of some unrelated conversation. 50/50 on if "google" is ever mentioned, too.
I frequently reply to my kids with "Ok, go $do_a_thing" and I almost always trigger my phone, even if it's in my pocket. The kicker is that I use "Hey Google" when I want the assistant so the "Ok Google" form is not even needed.
This is why I only have Siri enabled on my watch which isn’t listening while the face is dimmed. And yet it still randomly triggers a few times a month
My Google Mini gets triggered several times a night when I'm watching video. Maybe 1/3 of the time it's somebody saying "ok", but most of the time it seems to be random.
Vaguely reminiscent of when Marco V released a track called "C:\ del *.mp3"[0] out of frustration towards mp3 rips. Still amusing to me that he didn't quite get the command right.
The other day a song called S01E02.Return.Of.The.Arsonist.720p.HDTV.x264 by Blood Command appeared in my Spotify Discover Weekly. I thought someone messed up, but no...that's the name of song!
Instead of "C:\ del .mp3", it should be "del C:\ .mp3".
Edit: lol, I didn't know that we could format text with asterisks on HN. There should be an asterisk before each ".mp3", but as you can see, if I put them in it just italicizes the text in between them.
Cheers to you and sp332 below, it's appreciated. There's a certain irony in me chuckling over the incorrect code in the track title and then being unable to format my own text minutes later, haha.
The default responses for assistants are getting much worse, to the point where a misheard phrase can do a lot of things you don’t want instead of just stopping immediately.
My favorite misfeature is babbling. Used to be you could just say “off” to stop a misinterpreted command, which worked fine because the assistant didn’t used to babble. Now though, its own rambling follow-ups interfere with its ability to even hear you desperately saying “no! off! stop! shut up! cancel!”. And my new favorite, every command response ending with an unsolicited “BY THE WAY: $thing_i_did_not_ask_for”.
Some years ago I went to do something by voice and wanted to cancel "Ok Google ... nevermind" and then it played Nevermind by Nirvana. Thought that was goofy, I didn't ask to play music or anything.
For a while, I had a Spotify playlist called "My Playlist called My Playlist" so I could say "Hey Google, play my playlist called 'My Playlist called My Playlist'"
The funny thing is that this bit doesn't even work because you would have to say "Ok Google play Ok Google Play Music". The bit would be much more effective if the album was just named "Music" and the tracks various genres. However then the fact that the name is a bit isn't even noticeable. There is a weird balancing act between the effectiveness of art and making it clear that what you are doing is art at all. This artist choice the latter.
> The funny thing is that this bit doesn't even work because you would have to say "Ok Google play Ok Google Play Music"
the next step for it to go really viral would be to make the album consist only of various generic voices saying "ok google play ok google play music".
What if you said, "Alexa play Ok Google Play Music"? Might be a scenario when both your Alexa and Google devices (e.g. android phones, etc) would start play music unintentionally.
I first noticed this type of thing happening when "Ok Google, play Release Radar" started playing a "Releaseradar" album/single vs. my Spotify Release Radar playlist as it used to. Simply infuriating.
I took that to be the point; that in addition to all the title permutations, the user may have to prepend the command of whatever service they're using.
This creates even more combinations and even more shenanigans.
I've worked on large music platforms and this kind of spam is always an ongoing battle. You'll see artists pop up with the same name as a popular song, songs named 'play [genre]', and all sorts of things.
Try getting an Alexa/Siri or whatever to play "Radio" by Rammstein. Come back when you're done listening to random top 40 radio or being told there is no Rammstein radio station and click the link below to hear the song.
I recall a funny incident where I was having a slack call with a colleague and I said something on the lines of
"Ok Google it". Their Google assistant was enabled and it repeated the last command which was very NSFW. I couldn't control my laughter and we had a nice little laughing break over it
Yesterday, while listening to a song in the car, I asked Google Assistant to "play more of this album", and of course I it began playing a song called "More Of This" by an unknown band rather than what you would think would have been an obvious assistance.
Remember back when Apple was running ads for Chance the Rapper's debut album (Apple Music exclusive) "Coloring Book?" Apple was also pushing a lot into Siri. I can't recall the specifics, but I thought the ad had Chance saying "hey siri play coloring book."
So, I asked Siri the above prompt. Siri took me to Apple Music and played an album with the name "Coloring Book" but by a different artist.
Spotify's mobile app is honestly one of the worst f'in apps I have ever used. I have a family plan and both my wife and I have the same issues.
First, Spotify has no idea how to pipe its playlists to Alexa and Google ... so you can't ever seem to get either to play playlists.
Second, Spotify randomly decides sometimes that it won't connect to the Internet, even when your phone has a 4G connection and everything else works fine. To compound the issue, Spotify doesn't know how to show you your offline downloads when you are in Android Auto mode ... so you basically can't even play your songs when on a drive.
I need to figure out how to export my playlists and then I'm off Spotify forever. Worse customer experience ever.
I don't really understand : If someone say "Ok Google, play Music", the home assistant will search for a song called "music", not "Ok Google Play Music" ?
It’s generic filler music. It exists so that the uploader gets paid when someone says “OK Google play music” and the voice assistant inadvertently pulls up the album.
No idea I don't have Spotify or use any google assistant stuff, but i'm guessing it's supposed to make it so if you try to open google play music using a voice assistant, it'll instead play that album from Spotify. Maybe as a joke, maybe as a way to try and get a bunch of artificial listens.
I have noticed that my Google assistant is getting less smart by the day. It used to understand a lot more, now it keeps playing the wrong thing or turning off all the lights instead of one... or it won’t stop the alarm when you say stop. It’s been getting really frustrating... I would be more upset but they pretty much give those mini speakers away any chance they get.
Is anyone working on touch screen home assistant interfaces? I think some Alexa devices have a mode, but they still seem primarily designed for speech and I think of limited use to mutes. And judging by other comments, seems like a lot of other people want something more discoverable than trying random phrases and hoping for the best.
If this was good music I would applaud the ingenuity. However, it's handpan music, which I like, but it's so poorly recorded that it's... just wow. Bad. Lot's of annoying high end reverberation and a ground loop hum on one track I listened to.
And every track ends with vocals saying "this was drumkoon."
I've had moderate luck with podcasts; I use Google's podcast app, and want voice commands when driving. But it only works 50-70% of the time, and only with some of the podcasts.
I'd much rather just have the ability to set trigger words that execute macros. Really, there are only a few of them that i need regularly.
How about an album called "Ok Google Play \"Ok Google Play Music\""...
It's amusing to think that there is an elegant solution to this problem in text --- quoting --- which unfortunately a lot of the population doesn't understand beyond one level at most, but also cannot easily be expressed verbally.
I wonder if you could have:
a) song called Recursion on Spotify that has lyrics of "Ok Google, play Recursion on Play Music"
b) a song with the same title but lyrics "Ok Google, play Recursion on spotify" on Play Music (or whatever it's called now).
Anybody who uses a "smart assistant" is either easily amused or likes to suffer... They are the embodiment of why the current AI fad will end up like the last one. No intelligence at all.
My daughter almost always asks Google Home to play songs with made up words for titles. Google almost always responds with hip hop, almost always super inappropriate. I love it.
This violates one of the terms of the iTunes Music Style Guide. You're not allowed to reference Apple's competitors. So, yeah, iTunes might well refuse to carry it.
We usually play songs by Super Simple Song for my kids and recently I cannot play any song using Alexa. It always plays the "sing along" version no matter what
Similarly, there’s a podcast called the “Bill Simmons Podcast Podcast”, which one of my voice assistants consistently chooses rather than the real one.
I had an amazing indie music discovery service in Google Play Music. I found so many fantastic underplayed artists, and it helped me explore all the small music venues in my city. I've got a wall full of signed albums from artists I discovered with Google Play Music.
YouTube music recommends Britney Spears. It's so awfully wrong about my tastes.
It also randomly inserts YouTube parody videos into my playlist. Why the hell would I want to listen to stuff like this
https://youtu.be/-5jWtz3rzco ?
I hate Google so much now. They're like evil 90's Microsoft, but incompetent. They've got their ad monopoly / web destruction engine to sustain them, but they're Dilbert Pointy Haired Boss bad with everything else.
No gamers will be surprised when Stadia gets canned.
It'll be hilarious when they decide to shutter GCP. Remember when it leaked that they were internally threatening to defund it if they couldn't hit growth targets? Imagine all their B2B relationships getting hit as hard as their consumers do.
Viewed differently: it is ultimately a good thing that Youtube Music is bad, because otherwise, that would be another thing dominated by Google.
It's like people lamenting how sad it is that Windows mobile failed. Well, why would you want Microsoft to dominate both desktop and mobile market? Seems like a scary scenario.
In this perspective, I can appreciate how clueless Google can be sometimes. It's not a bug, it's a feature! ;)
Yeah, but I would like to have a good music product. I'm currently between options because nothing works for me. I was a happy Google Play Music subscriber for years. All they had to to was change the colour scheme and swap the backend and I would have been a happy camper. Now I have canceled my subscription and don't know what to use.
At the end of the day music isn't critical to me, so I don't really care if Google dominates it. If I had to switch I'm not too worried about being locked into something.
> YouTube music recommends Britney Spears. It's so awfully wrong about my tastes.
Just dislike these songs/videos. At first all I did was play playlists I already had in YT since the 'my mix' (now "my supermix") playlist had random songs I listened to 5 years ago, but after about a week of using the 'my mix' and disliking songs, I started getting a bunch of great songs from artists that I otherwise had no idea about.
The problem is, OP already did this. So did I. How much in-fighting is there at google that they couldn't just port over the data?
Right now I'm pissed that Google tv doesn't have a working account switcher. If my wife watches music videos it retrains my YouTube music.
Also, youtube music sucks when it comes to spotty connections and file management. I have fiber at work and home, unmetered 4g, and 100gig free space on my phone. Why doesn't it just download everything? I loose service for hours on end and I come to find that it has either not saved any songs or it has deleted everything it can. Today I started an album and then hit a dead spot, and it had deleted all the songs before the track I was on, and not qeued up the rest of the album. Google music had a setting where you could tell it to allocate gigs of space and keep it full. This push to simplify user experiences is why I avoid apple, and I hate seeing it creep into google.
Could not agree more. Even little stuff like my son who is on my family plan. He used Google Play Music all the time with no problems. When they forced us to move to YT Music, now it won't let him get the app because he's too young and YT isn't allowed. So I either have to give up all the parental controls that I need and use, or he can't access the family plan music subscription that I pay for and used to have with no problems at all, because I was forcefully migrated to a new service I didn't want when the old one was perfectly fine. I despise the new world we are in.
I'm about to go full self-hosted on a ton of stuff. Plex, Book Sonic, Next Cloud, etc. Then I can move when I want to move.
Edit: I actually bought a used (came from Google I believe) Dell R620 on ebay, loaded to the hilt (dual 8 core (16 total physical cores) E5-2650, 256 GB RAM, 10 600GB drives (SAS)). They're amazingly affordable. I paid around $750 with shipping. I can run a hell of a lot of stuff on that and since I'm mostly at home these days it will be blazing fast (way better than existing cloud stuff that is limited by my 20Mbps downlink, which is the fastest I can get). Nothing like a Gigabit connection to my "cloud" :-D
Unfortunately the problem with self-hosting these things is actually obtaining the content (mainly regarding movies since iTunes song purchases haven't been DRM protected for a long time). Getting the right set-up for removing DRM from your uhd/hd blu-rays is hard since hardware is constantly being updated (you might have to purchase second-hand blu-ray readers), and downloading them is technically illegal even if you have the physical media - not that the FBI is going to indict you for having a personal media library. I imagine books have the same issues if you're trying to get unencrypted digital versions of them.
I try to buy all my audio books from Downpour since they are DRM free, and music as you mentioned isn't a problem. I was very into music in the 90s/00s and bought nearly every CD I wanted and I ripped them into mp3s years ago. I may just budget a $100 or so to buy mp3s I don't have that I still want to listen to, and cancel YT music.
I don't often buy ebooks since I love physical paper, but when I do I try to buy DRM free or use Calibre/Apprentice Alf to strip the DRM and convert to epub.
Movies are a real challenge though. Plenty of older stuff I have on DVD and it's easy to rip, but it does take an enormous amount of effort to rip blu-ray. I may try to do an OTA antenna hooked into Plex for most of TV, but will probably keep CBS all access and a couple others for movies/shows/etc. So I'll self host most things :-D
I definitely get some nice new music on my supermix.
I also get songs I've already thumbs downed reappearing repeatedly. It's bizarre how bad it is in some respects, while still being decent in others. (They're not even new top hits being aggressively promoted. It's mostly 80s rock they'll toss in no matter how many times I say I "no, I don't like this song".)
Dude just stop giving Google the benefit of the doubt and switch to Spotify. Google has proven time and time again that their priorities lie within their advertising and their search engine - Everything else is a monetized side project.
I've tried Spotify, its great but their inability to upload your own music is a gamebreaker for me, since I listen to a decent amount of indie and obscure bands and songs
You can add custom music in the Spotify desktop client, and if you have a mobile device on the same network, it'll automatically upload it to that device as well. Not cloud based though.
Just tried it. My experience might be abnormal, but it seems glitchy and slow. A playlist that I already created with my offline songs synced with my phone, but playlist said 0 songs. No error messages, very unintuitive. Had to create a new playlist and add the songs again, still wasn't showing. Relaunched spotify on both devices two times and it finally showed up. And this is for ~20 songs. I wouldn't want to use this method on a big library.
Also, Spotify doesn't upload your music for streaming, its just a sync between your phone and computer that have to be on the same wifi, and keeps the songs downloaded on your phone. Wouldn't work for a collection bigger than your phones storage. I wouldn't even compare this to GPM.
Years later I'm still bitter about them buying and killing Songza, it was one of my favorite recommendation algorithms to date, probably second only to "The Upload" auto playlist on SoundCloud.
> YouTube music recommends Britney Spears. It's so awfully wrong about my tastes.
Despite the fact that your Google Play Music "like" data is migrated into YT music, it doesn't seem to properly incorporate it in the algorithmically generated playlists.
What I've found is that I basically need to treat YT music as a clean slate, and specifically start playing and re-liking things (i.e., I'd re-play my favorite albums, thumb-down and thumb-up again the songs in them).
Now that I've done this, it's doing well enough - in some ways better than GPM was (multiple "mixes" presented as options with different clusters of artists in the summaries).
I can't say whether re-thumbing was what did the trick, or simply re-listening, though. And it's incredibly stupid that I should have to do this to make it work correctly.
Thanks! I built it several years ago and never really promoted it as it seemed to me like the ability to play on your phone was crucial, but not really possible to do with YouTube videos on iOS. Ahh well.
Had similar experiences. A funny bug was when I pressed the next button too fast for some reason my playlist was switched out with most popular (I guess). It was only Britney Spears and Justin Bieber.
Totally agree on the playlists too. I recently liked a video on youtube where a dude put guitar strings in his piano and for some reason yt music put that in my liked music playlist. It doesn't even contain actual music, just explanations of what he's doing
Not gonna lie. I'm very disappointed I can't sync my Stadia controller to my PC via bluetooth. Google gave out Stadia pros, but it's such a horrible idea ( instead of Xbox Game pass stadia forces you to buy additional games).
Google provides a gateway to the internet for most of us. They control what we find in most cases , but it's almost as if they have tons of money to spend elsewhere but lack any direction on how to do so.
The apps do, but the website does not. music.google.com used to have native support, but to cast music.youtube.com you have to cast the tab, which is far less than perfect. (Instead of streaming directly from the CDN to the chromecast, casting a tab will stream from your desktop to the chromecast. It works so poorly that sometimes even the pitch changes slightly, like an old timey recording.)
I tried it for three months. It pauses randomly in my browser and Google Home. The "radio" feature repeats songs like crazy, the queuing is super confusing and inconsistent (it depends on the "type" of playlist you are listening to IIUC) and it consistently recommended me the same songs.
It had some nice features too, but I decided to quit. Now I'm just listening to my collection of mp3s but not super happy.
Every time this topic comes up on here the comments are full of complaints about 1) privacy and 2) broken ux. I have to ask why do you even bother? I’ve never once thought I wish I didn’t have to pick up my phone got 5 seconds to do something simple.
It's incredibly handy when cooking. "Hey Google set up a 15 minutes timer", "Hey Google how many teaspoons is in a cup?", etc while you have your hands dirty / busy.
no doubt its useful for that but is it really worth it considering the price? arent most assistants powered by batteries so it also has an ongoing cost, especially if you have multiple devices? all that just to add a timer 3-5 seconds quicker?
and then there's still other issues like privacy or the thing being an expensive paperweight if you're Internet isn't working
Trump should tweet "Multiple election sources called this election differently" would be hilarious. Twitter has been mocking him for a long time now with this line. But would take on the opposite meaning if he tweeted it, because its a pretty a stupid vague statement, that implies the election has multiple people calling it differently...or in other words is disputed.
80% of the time my lights would turn on.
20% of the time, I’d be greeted with: “Ok, playing ‘Turn on the Lights’ by Future on Spotify.”
And I’d stand there in the dark, listening to music I don’t like, questioning my life decisions.