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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

I use my voice assistant on my phone to set timers.

That's it.

The other day, I wanted it to open an app and start recording when I say "Hey Google, take a voice note"... but no dice :/

Just say "Hey Google, open Live Transcribe" (assuming you had that app installed)

This highlights part of the problem. Google sell/advertise products for companies but people want to use tools.

People want "[wake word], [action] [modifiers]".

Companies want "[trademark product] [trademark product] [modifiers]" (eg the parents example "Hey Google (RTM), Live Transcribe (RTM) 'words to transcribe'").

I've only used Alexa (and only for fun) but the replacement of verbs with companies/products, and of nouns with proper nouns, is really annoying to me and gets in the way IMO.

Weather is also useful! Sometimes reminders, which are basically timers. But yea that's it.

Siri doesn't get the weather right.

"What's the weather in Yosemite" and "Yosemite weather" can get you two drastically different results. As of right now (10/26/2020 10:35 AM) the two results I get are 43F and 32F.

Siri is always mistaken. Alexa is pretty good.

Alexa is super easy to make a skill for (IIRC it's one XML/JSON file hosted somewhere and registered with Amazon). So you could probably make your own with ~IFTTT to scrape the data. Alexa has "daily briefing" which will then go through a list of skills which can include your own [public] skills.

I made an "and finally ..." to add funny news to the end of the daily briefing and was super impressed how easy it was.

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