Dear lord.
When your options are a few competing BigCos and you don’t have incentive to try to build it for yourself because it straddles the annoying in-between space of “frustrating enough to do something” and “ not frustrating or valuable enough to actually solve the problem.”
> The closest I could get to punching Google in the ear and ripping out its nose hairs.
As if giving more money to another shitty megacorp for another frustrating device is going to make any difference to the first shitty megacorp.
Do you have a better recommendation of a smart speaker that can play spotify, youtube music, or tidal?
I was amazed at my own level of anger at that. It was just a voice in my ears but I reacted to it viscerally like it was an assault. It didn't help that it was in the middle of a sequence of it telling one lie after another, like "yes, I can disconnect this conversation." Maybe what I had is a natural reaction to having a lying clueless asshole refuse to go away or shut up, which I haven't otherwise had to deal with lately.
The interface into the LLM is tokens in and out (text, images, audio). And the harness generally doesn't understand what you're passing in. The LLM has nothing to do other than to respond with tokens and empty responses (eg. just a stop token) have been aggressively trained out of it.
P.S. I hope that dehydration/headaches question was a poorly chosen example and not something someone over the age of 5 seriously needs an answer to.
I experience this mostly when asking for music. Before gemini, mistakes were common but deterministic. It was easy to understand where the query had gone wrong and so how to fix it. Example:
"Hey google, play Blackstar"
(Plays the album blackstar by David Bowie, not what I wanted)
"Hey google, play "Blackstar by Radiohead"
(Plays the right thing).
Now:
"Hey Google, play Blackstar by Radiohead" can result in playing... something vaguely semantically related with no way to course correct. In this exact instance (happened yesterday!) it played an album by the hip hop due Black Star.
I will admit that there are some superpowers hidden in Gemini that were not present in the previous AI assistant. I recently discovered that Gemini can manipulate the navigation app, and a prompt like "Mute alerts" works, which is kind of cool. However like OP said, it's incredibly verbose, which is super annoying.
Pre-gemini, you knew what you would get, basically the structured snippets that would appear at the top of the search results.
Now it's much more verbose.
My biggest gripe is that it basically stopped listening to me, since "upgrading" to Gemini, which is frustrating because I've used it to control the Hue lights for the past decade.
It listens to my partner though, so after it fails to listen to me, I have to ask her to ask Google to adjust the fing lights.
Welp
https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-commits-to-subscriptions-e...
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscription...
They rolled it back though afaik because the whole idea was a comically evil idea.
> Not because it was smart.
> Because it was useful.
I was half expecting "and that's bold" after that.
I agree. I wasn't smart but it was useful in certain cases. Now it's just lobotomized.
perhaps, but people did ask for cheaper cars.
But more importantly... screens were put in more expensive cars first, and slowly trickled down to budget cars. It's a very weak argument that it was done for cost reasons. Screens are flashy and impress people during their 5 minute test drive. "Wow! Think of all the things I can do in my car that I couldn't do with a knob for changing fan speed." Sure, living with those screens tends to be a bit less enjoyable than those first impressions lead you to believe, but bright colorful animated screens helped to sell cars. If they're actually less expensive than knobs and buttons, that's just a bonus for the manufacturers.
Also keep in mind, when screens first appeared in (expensive) cars, they weren't actually cheaper than the knobs and buttons they replaced. Technology is, sorry was getting cheaper per unit of performance over time. Screens became commonplace and inexpensive to put in cars, but I suspect they were ten times more expensive than all the knobs and levers they replaced when they started appearing in luxury cars.
A DSLR camera is better than a phones camera, a voice assisting device seems replaceable however.
(Although, based on the tone, I think it's Grok.)
Karen, you mean you don't want those things. Stop confusing want and need.
- The Manager.
A huge pet peeve of mine is when I’m in the car and want to know what song is playing on the radio. I run Shazam and my phone mutes the stereo to activate a microphone. I have to disconnect from CarPlay then run Shazam, then reconnect — it’s a passenger only operation.
Song recognition is built into both iOS and Android, the device should always use the internal mic instead of a CarPlay/Android Auto microphone over Bluetooth.
Side note: is there a good “dumb smart speaker” I can have run with a wake word connected to my own API? Speech to Text and Speech to Speech are fairly well supported for local AI workflows now, it would be great to have my own Home device without worrying about where the audio goes.
I’m sure it’s a very niche audience today, but I imagine giving this thing MCP for Wikipedia, a music app, and my recipes would be perfect.
Thank you!
Related from the last month:
Google changes its search box
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197370
Google Declaring War on the Web
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214449
Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266051
Google Hates You
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48313538
You can no longer Google the word 'disregard'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238351
The IBM-ification of Google?
I know nobody did, but seeing as I was too young (and maybe not even alive?) I have always wanted to try it. I'm a Coca Cola enthusiast after all. I wish they'd release a "Throwback Experimental Coke" batch out. I assume it was their attempt to flavor coke without the coca leaves?
No…, you are.
From the examples given I haven't seen any meaningful life improvement with them.
Companies don't care when nerds complain. We always complain. But when their normal user base starts jumping ship, then they could very well start listening.
I do not care about whatever stupid feature you want to build engagement around. Do what I asked you to do and then shut up.
And don't get me started on the Alexa Show that had the audacity to display ads.
PMs keep trying to make them "smarter," and it just makes the core user journeys worse.
Surely they think they're inventing cars when we're griping about buggy ships. But it really feels like voice assistants peaked ~10y ago for the things people actually want them for.
complianceowll•51m ago
ncr100•38m ago
Having used Google home assistant since it came out for all the things that it's good for, and watched its quality fluctuate, I find I really have to be more careful nowadays when I ask it questions because it can go overboard more easily.
Is there a term in AI research where it underappreciates the specificity that is being asked for?
Perhaps the AI could be default prompted, "you are a kitchen AI assistant and should tend to answer in facts and details and that are relevant to the current moment."
nyeah•35m ago