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Comment by givinguflac | Hacker News Reader

My wife is exactly the customer that's given up on asking Siri questions and uses it for timers. I can agree that Google does a better job at answering questions, but I don't like that Google requires access to just about everything in my life to be at all worthwhile, which is generally why I avoid google services. I realize I'm a minority but I don't like their all or nothing approach to slurping my data.

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Does Android really answer questions? The only one I know to work is "How high is Mount Everest?". For everything else, it just reads the first sentence of the Wikipedia article, or presents a search. I'm using a German phone, so an English one might work better. But mine doesn't even know "What color is the sky?"

My dad uses Google Now like this all the time. The first sentence of the Wikipedia article is generally a pretty useful summary of whatever you were searching for -- maybe this is a difference between the English and the German Wikipedia articles? Google now is pretty good at trivia in general though. I just asked mine who won the 1995 NCAA Basketball Championship, and I learned the UCLA Bruins won. My google now says the sky is blue when I ask it as well.

I just asked mine 'what color is the sky', and it gave a reasonable answer, which is sourced from NASA.

Might be a lack of corpus? Idk. Seems like if they could perfectly solve translate, that wouldn't be an issue heh heh (strong if).

I can't wait until personal agent AI has advanced to the point where I can ask that and hear "Cerulean blue. Cerulean makes me think of a breeze. A gentle breeze..."

The future AI will find your post on the internet and will answer this as a joke.

Dangit. I shouldn't have said anything, then. I want my personal AI agent to watch all the movies and television shows I have ever watched, and read all the books I have ever read, and play all the video games I have ever played, so that it can make obscure references that I can understand at the appropriate times.

In this case, it would have to know the various names of sky-blue colors, like "azure", "cerulean", "process cyan", or technical answers like "transparent with Rayleigh scattering" or "hue value between 190 and 200 degrees". Then it would have to cross reference that with things I have already seen or read, and then prioritize several potential responses before finally playing me an audio clip from X-Files 3:17 "Pusher", when the eponymous character is being transported in the back of a cop car.

Google has their knowledge graph, a semantic search engine for the most commonly asked questions.

The wikipedia page for Knowledge graph cites Thomas Jefferson as an example, so I asked 'what years was Thomas Jefferson in office?', and Google deferred to the first paragraph of TJ's wiki.

Then I asked 'What year was Thomas Jefferson born?', and it gave me a direct answer.

So it sorta works, but it's not super awesome.

The thing that always impresses me about Google Now and their voice parsing in general isn't so much about speaking answers back to spoken queries but just how good it can be at guessing what you mean.

My favorite example was a couple of years ago when I was at a bar. There was a song on the jukebox ("Coffee Pot" by Cajmere) which, for reference, is a house music song with a repeated vocal sample that says "It's time for the perculator [sic]". I assume they mean "percolator" but that's how the guy pronounces it in the sample.

Anyway, we were joking around and even though the bar was quite loud with people talking loudly all around and music playing, I pulled out my phone and asked "Ok, Google: is it time for the perculator?" I pronounced it incorrectly like the guy in the song and within seconds, I had results. The top one was a link to the video for "Coffee Pot" by Cajmere on Youtube and the rest were links to other stuff regarding the song.

Now, this was at least 2 years ago and possibly more. The response to my silly joke of a question wasn't so witty as to give me a spoken "it's time for the perculator" or anything like that....but it could parse my words despite all the noise and competing speech around me, it understood a mispronounced word, and it knew that this lyric sample referred to a song with a different title (Coffee Pot) and linked me to the video.

That was seriously the first time I was really impressed by their voice assistant even if it was a ridiculous request. No idea what the result would be on today's Google Now or tomorrow's Assistant (guess I'll find out when my Pixel gets delivered). Still, even if just from an engineering and software angle, that made me grin a bigger geeky grin than I might have imagined.

I find all of the voice responses from both to be tediously slow. I'm a fast speaker, and I like it when people speak at a fast pace with me.

I like that Google seems to just display information for may of the responses vs. trying to cram in some overly long witty reply or verbatim reading of the text that takes too long to speak back.

Having some sort of speed/succinctness setting would be helpful in that regard.

The German version is much worse than the English one. It's worth switching the phone language to English to try it there.

It's not that different with Siri, they always brag with features in English, localization takes a while and has much less resources allocated it seems.

The eye-opener for me was the movie Her. That take on personal assistants was amazing, but it seemed to have with it the assumption of personal privacy between you and the assistant, and unbridled access to ALL of your data.

So a good exercise is to rewatch that movie, and in each scene where the assistant does something useful or cool, take a moment to reflect on what sort of data they would need access to, and how that data might be used.

I think where things get murky is that the movie didn't really touch on the company behind it at all, and if anything it almost gave the impression of being more like Apple than Google. As such, it neatly skirted today's concerns where the clear leader in the space (Google), is an advertising company that monetizes it's users' data and is constantly raising privacy concerns.

It is a fine line to walk, but ultimately everyone will need to weigh the decision in their mind as to the right balance of privacy and convenience.

I don't think you are part of a minority. Apple apparently doesn't think that, too.

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