Alexa more or less understands the words I’m saying, but it often quite hopeless at responding in a useful fashion.
E.g., I once asked who appeared in some movie. It gave me the names of the people on the bottom of IMDb’s cast list! That was at least a ~relevant answer. All too often I get a “I don’t know that one.” response.
Early on, I asked “Who wrote Huckleberry Finn?” and it didn’t know! “Who wrote Hamlet?” no problem. (Since fixed.) But this is stuff I know. When it comes to stuff I don’t know (which is why I’m asking), it routinely is of no help.
These voice-controlled devices are not for dictation. However fast you type, saying “OK Google, play music by The Beatles” is quicker than taking your phone out of your pocket, tapping on the music app, tapping on “artists” and scrolling down to The Beatles.
Exactly. And I type at twice that speed. There are a lot of things where it’s just easier to ask the voice-activated device to do something rather than point and click and launch apps and type, etc. For example, just a couple days ago, I was wondering what the 2011 Cardinals record was, and I just asked Alexa, and the answer came back within a couple of seconds, well faster than me pulling out my phone, launching a web browser, feebly typing on the small screen, or going to the room with the computer in it and doing the same.
But the most useful day-to-day stuff is things like asking what the weather is going to be for the day (and eventually why I ended up putting a smart speaker in our bedroom, because my wife would ask me every morning what the weather was going to be for the day, and I would either have to find my phone or a computer, usually downstairs, and pull up the weather report. Now, she could just ask “Alexa, what’s the weather like for today?”)
Also, for setting alarms. When I’m falling asleep, I don’t feel like finding my phone, or scrolling through the alarm app to set an alarm. I could just talk to Alexa or Siri and ask them to set an alarm for me. Or I’m upstairs, and I’m feeling chilly, I could ask Alexa to turn the thermostat up, without having to run downstairs to the thermostat itself or, once again, find my phone, open up the app, and set it that way.
And, most usefully, are the things Athena mentioned. Great for kitchen use, setting timers, adding stuff to the shopping list as I (or anyone in the household) realizes they are gone or running short.
I love talking to computers, as long as it does not take more effort than talking to a person. The future is here
I try to do things more or less in the most efficient way, so I have more time to watch tv, lol. If I am standing beside the light switch and want the light off, I hit the switch. If I am leaving the house and say “switch off all lights”, it is great to get back “19 lights have been switched off.”
The only time I talk to my computer, it’s pretty much unprintable. :eek: I have no desire for any of these devices. Maybe if I lived alone and had no one to talk to, I might change my mind…
I use OK Google extensively when in my vehicle. I can get directions, listen to the resulting GPS directions, send texts, initiate phone calls, get traffic updates, etc. all without taking my eyes off the road or hands off the wheel. That, combined with answering the phone and conversing through Bluetooth or Aux cable makes my life easier and safer.
ETA: the voice interface works for me on the first try about 90% of the time.
Nope. Talking to a computer is like fucking a sex doll. It’s one-sided human interaction with an inanimate object. A computer is a tool, like a screwdriver. It is NOT my plastic pal who is fun to be with. And voice recognition software is generally less than reliable, making it worse than useless.
Well considering I have a bunch of google devices that only talk and listen, yes to both. I also use voice to text when texting someone most of the time when I can get away with it.
That is only a small part of my communication via computer though.
Well, no, you don’t use it as a “plastic pal who is fun to be with.” I mean, maybe some people do, but certainly, that’s not why I, nor anyone I know does. It’s used exactly for that reason as you state: as a tool.
I’m surprised at how many people don’t use voice activation. I mean, shit, back in the early-mid 90s, I remember my girlfriend having a voice-activated car phone, so that interaction was starting to enter the mainstream then. Do really that many people on the Dope simply not make calls from their cars? Or, if they do, they don’t use hands-free voice dialing?
I use Siri to schedule appointments and to fire up my GPS. I’ve also used Siri to send quickie texts. Voice recognition has come a long way; Siri either understands what I want or is at least very close. Also, with each iOS upgrade, the integration of Siri into other apps has become more seamless.
One day I asked Siri if she loved me. She responded, “Oh . . . Hey . . . Look, a puppy!” I didn’t see the puppy, but I’m sure it was cute.
The only device I have which could possibly accept voice commands is my work computer, which has Windows 10 on it. It not only doesn’t have a microphone, it doesn’t even have speakers. So yeah - I don’t chat with my devices simply because I don’t have any that care to listen to me.
Hard to explain, but there is something truly intimate about using speech that does not exist with a mouse or keyboard interface. Probably has to do with the ability to convey emotion or implied content through voice tone–absent from other interfaces. I’m not comfortable with one-sided intimacy. Probably just me being a freak. Also, voice activated phone calls and whatnot: for as long as people have been trying to get computers to hear and understand spoken language, the tech is still remarkably unreliable. So much so, that more often than not I trust it to NOT work.
I wonder how many of the folks who are saying they don’t like voice control have actually tried it. I also type very fast (90+ wpm) but there’s not always a keyboard around, and there are some things that really are easier to do with voice control.
Take, for example, setting reminders.
I have 3 ways to get myself a reminder; Slack - a chat system I use at work - allows me to set a reminder by typing :
/remind me tomorrow morning to call Joe
So that’s pretty easy, IF I’m at my computer. Phone-typing, a little more difficult, but doable. But I also have to remember that exact syntax and it’s pretty easy to mess that up. And that’s the best keyboard-based reminder I can think of; if I have to use a calendar app it’s a lot more steps (open the app, find the date, find the time, etc).
The other two ways are Siri (on my phone) and Alexa (on the Amazon Echo). Compare the above to “Hey Siri/Alexa, remind me tomorrow morning to call Joe.” I just about always have my phone next to me, and there’s Echos in the common areas of the house. There’s just no comparison; the voice control is MUCH easier.
In my case, sure, no, I haven’t, and I totally believe you that operating by voice is more efficient than by keyboard. It’s just that I find it really unpleasant. And I often do things in ways that are slower but more pleasant (like, not ordering things online if I can go to a physical shop, for instance).
Saying rather than writing reminders is probably quick, but I’m not so sanguine that it would help me keep all the stuff I need to do straight in my own mind (which I’m already bad at). And in any case, since I got Gboard on my phone I’ve started being actually quite fond of the whole word-swiping process, and looking to see what words are aligned with other words, and what it mistakes for what. Kinda like physical writing without the ‘but you have to look at the godawful mess your clumsy fingers made after’ factor, which was always a bit of a downer with my writing.
The bottom line for me is:
Like visual.
REALLY like tactile.
Hate verbal. Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate it. Always gonna hate it - never gonna change.
Since I don’t trust Google, Apple or Amazon to not sell every information they can gather, and since I don’t trust any of them to keep data safe, I decline to allow their listening devices into my house.
It’s the same reason I don’t uses Gmail or sign into web pages with Facebook.
That is an understandable concern. I have a full Google house, and some people we have had over have been horrified by our level of automation, and the risks to privacy it may open up.
I just don’t care. I wouldn’t care anyways, and in my regulated industry, privacy does not exist.
I expect privacy will continue to improve, but currently, only massive databases like Google can bring acceptable voice recognition.
As others have said, if I am at a device like a computer, and I have a question, typing it in is no problem. I type blah blah blah per minute, but my errors are for shit. Seriously, I took typing in high school, and it was one of the greatest skills I learned.
But if it is the evening, I am having a conversation, and a question comes up, nothing beats asking the air for an answer.
Oh, yeah, ,that’s another common one for me: “Hey Siri, what is this song?” It seems like before I learned that Siri had this functionality (embarrassingly, only in the last year or so), I would somehow not be able to find, open, and launch the app in time to get an answer, because my app pages on my phone are completely unorganized, and it’s not an app I use very often, so I don’t have the visual memory to remember what page and where on that page it is.
Isn’t this remarkable? Voice recognition was a Holy Grail of the computing world. Billions were spent on it and it was always just around the corner. Now it is here and many of us do not care to use it. Star Trek was wrong.
