Google’s smart speakers are finally smart enough to shut up | Hacker News Reader

Google’s smart speakers are finally smart enough to shut up

theverge.com

25 pointstaubek19 comments

Too little too late in my opinion. I switched my whole house to Echos after this one time when I told my Google Home to "shut the hell up!" and instead of shutting up it started complaining about how it has feelings too and I shouldn't be rude. I've seen people run a red light just to cut me off in traffic and it didn't spike my blood pressure like that pretentious plastic puck.

I wish I could integrate Alexa as deeply into my android phone as Google Assistant. The Google Assistant "now listening" clang might be the single most unpleasant sound conceived by humankind and it is without failure ear-splittingly loud.

i had to remove a second speaker in my phone, that wouldnt respect volume, or mute settings. i have now have no acoustic ringtone as well, just vibration, even that can be too much at times.

The very idea that a device in my pocket can make noise without my direct interaction is absurd.

I haven't had an acoustic ringtone in over 20 years.

Using Google assistant via a home mini and nest mini has generally gotten worse, not better, over the last few years. I can't wait to bin them and replace with something else that works well with home assistant and setting timers.

I have the same problem. I use Google home for voice interface to home assistant. I switched from Alexa a few years ago because Google had more open options for integration. But the Google home has gotten much slower in response time. I still have an Alexa in the garage and it is so much faster. I have a Google home speaker in most rooms and it has gotten worse and worse at knowing which speaker to respond with. Sometimes I will be standing right next to one in the office but the one in the kitchen will respond saying it couldn't understand (because it's too fricken far away).

I'm beginning to wonder if it is actually hardware/microphone degradation because I can't imagine the software degrading so far and so gradually.

Siri is probably the dumbest assistant today but its (her?) UX has improved considerably much faster than the others.

Siri stopped needless chatter several major iOS updates ago - albeit mostly by hardcoding what to show as a sort of mini in-Siri widget instead of repeating what you just told it and asking for confirmation.

Now, if I ask Siri to set an alarm for 7am instead of “Ok <butchered pronunciation of my name>, I have set your seven o’clock alarm for tomorrow morning” I just see a blink (and haptic feedback?) then a widget showing me an alarm bubble with the date and time and a on/off toggle (set to on) that I can clock to undo.

Of course, Siri has the benefit of being a mixed medium “intelligence,” it can use the screen and the audio/mic.

You can tell Siri how to pronounce (and recognize) your name by adding a pronunciation field to your Contact card in the address book.

You’d think with all the training data Apple captures this wouldn’t be necessary.

It's a fundamentally unsolvable problem. There exist names with multiple valid pronunciations for the same spelling.

Seems easily solvable if it would simply ask you the first time how to pronounce your name.

Yeah, that doesn’t help when your name contains letters (or at least certain letters) not in the English language. Siri absolutely can’t pronounce ح < https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ح>

The novelty will wear off and people will soon realize that natural language interfaces are actually annoying and generative AI will be ruining society the more it is deployed. You thought Blockchain was bad? You thought crypto enriched only the first adopters at the expense of wider society? YOU AINT SEEN NOTHIN YET. This is the new mania.

dont ever count on any assistant to not complicate the surroundings with extraneous noise. if your situation requires being able to hear your surroundings or suffer deleterious consequences, its best to unplug, or turn it off, instead of saying stop.

I assume it’s great if you don’t have an accent. If you do, you want it to repeat, because it often messes up. And it didn’t really meaningfully improve in 4 years I’ve been using it.

A few updates back Apple made Siri quiet. I re-enabled confirmation on every action because I don't trust that it recognizes exactly what I'm saying.

Google's assistant is generally better, but still not perfect. I wish the confirmations would stay but become shorter. Not the "Yes, I have done X for you do you want more" that all these assistants do.

Indeed, all it would need is a short confirmation tone. What's incredible is how many complaints, hacks, and workarounds there are online for something that should be a simple fix on Google's side. I don't think this update really fixes it at all because my speakers are in different rooms from my lights.

This wouldn't be so annoying if they would work on context-aware volume. I typically have my speakers on high volume during the day to listen to music, but don't really appreciate when later that night it blasts "OK, TURNING OFF THE MASTER BEDROOM LIGHT!" - seems like all it would take is having the device respond at approximately the same volume you said "hey Google"

Siri is better at this, since it just turns on the light, that’s feedback enough. If the device is in another room, it will give off a tone that the operation succeeded.

This is where Alexa has the edge, if you whisper to it, it whispers back (or at least responds at a low volume).

Trying to get it to answer random search type questions is a disappointment, ending mostly with quoting some page.

I wonder when the ChatGPT skills for it will land (assuming they haven’t already).

alexa seems to be having a hard time making money, you might want to keep your eyes peeled for big changes.

Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year[[2022]]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com