Comment by flipactual | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flipactual | Hacker News Reader

I would like to be able to tell any digital assistant enabled device in my home to "play latest episode of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency on the living room TV" and have it work. I feel like that's a very simple, minimal viable product, sort of request. Siri responds with "Hmm, I'm not finding anything for that."

I'd also like to be able to ask "How many steps have I taken today?" Siri responds with "I can't answer that on your iPhone but you can find it in the Health app: Open the Health app"

This may feel like a big ask considering the majority of the basics aren't covered on the platform I'm using, but compound questions would be wonderful – "show me the thirty largest US cities" "remove any that do not have a moderate climate" "which one has the lowest cost of living?"

If platforms already provide these services and I'm simply using the wrong one – oops.

I think the health one is just Apple being conservative when it comes to health data. I'm sure it's on purpose that they don't let the Health app talk to Siri directly.

However, it would be nice if you could tell Siri to play an episode of a show on a specific TV, but I think they would want you to have an Apple TV for every TV in your home, not just one to control all of the TVs.

I was thinking the same thing in regard to interfacing with the Health app. Wouldn't a simple Siri for Health opt-in fix this?

I've got a bad case of Apple lock in – Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, MacBooks. Saying, to my phone, "Play The Walking Dead on the TV" brings up TWD in the TV app (iOS 10.2, I haven't been paying attention, this is possibly beta track) which prompts me to start watching it... but it then plays on the phone. I can cast it to the TV, but I can't hand it off to the TV.

Maybe that's precisely how most people would expect and want it to work, but it seems unintuitive to me.

"Siri, close [app name]" "Siri, open Google Maps and show a route to [location]"

"Hey Siri" on the Mac would be good. So would more interaction between devices - so I could set up an alarm on one particular device from any other device.

Cloud things are still clumsy from that POV. A lot more could be integrated.

My biggest (minor) annoyance is not being able to toggle switches.

I can say "Alexa, lights on" and "Alexa, lights off".

But I can't just say "Alexa, lights" and have the app read the current state and flip it - which is annoying because it would be efficient and useful, but also because it's so close, and yet so far, from living in a Star Trek TNG episode.

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