Which voice assistant do you think is the best?
Displaying poll results.18647 total votes.
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The only assistant that's good (Score:4, Funny)
Is the Star Trek Computer.
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Computer, what is 2 + 2?
WORKING..... buzz... whir...click....
Re:The only assistant that's good (Score:5, Funny)
"Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to take you to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction, 'cause I don't. "
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I see there's both "They're all equally good" and "They're all equally bad" as answers. Surely they both bean the exact same thing?
I'm disappointed by seeing this on a geek site; I guess I'm just a glass half empty kinda person! :(
Equally good != Equally bad (Score:5, Insightful)
"They are all equally good" translates to "All of them seem to work well and no one seems to outshine the others."
"They are all equally bad" translates to "None of them work well."
A subtle difference, but one that conveys a vast difference of opinion.
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They can be both equally good and equally bad at the same time, but they are not the same thing.
For example, they are bad in that they all share your data with anyone who will pay for it. They're all good in that they can be useful for tools for shopping, navigation, and the many other features they offer.
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Yeah, that's actually an option for Alexa.... you can change her trigger to "computer" so you can say things like:
"Computer, turn on dungeon lights"
Assuming you have her connected to a Wink hub with a preset named "Dungeon Lights"
Of course, I (and everyone else who stalks me online, for that matter) am eagerly saving up to install a connected lock, so I can stand outside my house and yell "Computer, open the pod bay doors!" and have it happen.
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I would set the trigger word to "hey bitch" but I bet that wouldn't go over to well with some people.
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Yeah, but only if you have to say "Don't make me go upside that head!" to confirm all commands. :)
"Computer enable Inner City voice command mode"
"Computer enable Svetch voice command mode"
"Computer enable Southern:Tennessee voice command mode"
"Computer enable Southie voice command mode"
"Computer enable Alex:DrugieSpeak voice command mode"
The possibilities are endless.
This post counts as prior art and obviousness for any possible patents.
Rofl.
Re: The only assistant that's good (Score:1)
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Even the Star Trek computer had little regard for privacy. It regularly shared personal details of another person with any asker. And it had this annoying habit of not working at all in a moment of crisis!
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That would be Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, who voiced all of the computers in all of the various Star Trek shows and films, except the most recent ones. I met her at a fan run SF convention, Con*Cept, in Montreal, and she was a really nice person. I do think that we have enough of her speaking as the computer along with her other spoken roles to have a fairly complete vocabulary for a voice assistant. I am sure many others in addition to myself would like to have this on their phone, house assistant, car, GP
This isn't wrong (Score:1)
That's not wrong. The star trek computer didn't have to phone home with your raw voice in order to process it. Phoning home constantly with what your microphones hear is bad on so many levels.
Re: The only assistant that's good (Score:1)
Where is the complaint argument office? (Score:2)
How much of an argument would you like to buy today?
Yeah, I know we're not supposed to complain, but I've got two of them, and one is even the forbidden missing option complaint: Cowboy Neal has a voice and can give assistance. In theory. (But as a recovered Trekkie, logically I must agree with the FP about Nurse Chapel's voice on Star Trek TOS as another missing option. Today's voice assistants are still trying to catch up with old SF models.)
The main complaint is that this is an unanswerably bad poll. Wha
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I'd say Majel Barrett, not Nurse Chapel, mainly because in-canon you can hear distinct improvements in both vocal quality and capability between TOS and TNG and the spinoffs in the same era. It was always amusing when she was interacting with the computer, as she managed to speak as Lwaxana Troi just differently enough that it wasn't bloody obvious she was handling both parts.
As much as I would've loved for Majel Barrett's voice to be that of a personal assistant, I first heard William Daniels as K.I.T.T.
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Missing option: None (Score:5, Interesting)
I simply do not want to talk to my computer or any of my devices.
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Ditto especially when I can't even talk correctly. :(
Re:Missing option: Cowboy Bob (Score:2)
another great tradition, cast aside.....
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Hmm... Let me see if I can reply to your sig thusly:
https://goo.gl/photos/KSjmZ1Rm... [goo.gl]
Should be an image from 11 days ago. Not sure if the permissions will work properly.
Garmin (Score:2)
The newer GPSs are getting better about voice assistance, before they totally vanish from the market. Also, they're not telling Google/Amazon/Apple everything you're saying at home (yeah, I know, theoretically they don't usually do that) or letting TV commercials order bags of dogfood sent to you (really big bags, because Alexa knows it was a Labrador Retriever barking.)
Trade shows used to raffle off iPads and such. Now it's mostly Amazon Echo variants, which I actively don't want in my house, as opposed t
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It also assumes it does understand what you said. My experience is: it doesn't even when I do talk English to my phone. Obviously that is my fault. I'm not going to deny that.
Where I live, you see/hear no one use these systems.... For good reason.
On a decent keyboard, all of those are -by the way- faster
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Works fine if your street names are all real words that the system understands. Many however are not, so searching for street names with any of these can be infuriating as it can't figure out how to spell "shaganappi trail" same goes for business names, if it can't spell it, it can't find information on it.
Meanwhile simple things like the appointment example you give are so often screwed up because you put the subject and the time in the wrong order or something equally easy to do as a human who hasn't yet
P-Brain (Score:2)
P-Brain, [github.com] for privacy and extensibility reasons.
P-Brain in action [hackaday.com]
Other (Score:5, Insightful)
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And if you're a private detective, it kind of goes without saying that you're in a somewhat-disreputable relationship as an added bonus.
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I've had a few human assistants they did work better but still had trouble understanding instructions sometimes... Not to be confused with the girl that used to bring me lunch and coffee multiple times a day to get out of doing work because her boss was to frighten of me to come over to my office and tell her to go back to work.
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The human variety may be able to carry out tasks better, but they rarely know as much as a computer assistant.
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But the human variety can usually search google for it better than any of the voice assistants as they can both get your words transcribed right the first time, and understand the context of your request, neither of which even the most advanced assistants have much luck with.
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Given the quality of most of these, I think people are more likely to vote for any of them EXCEPT the ones they've tried!
A start but no more (Score:2)
The problem is that the intelligence is mostly in the speech recognition software making these assistants little more than the digital equivalent of the "Teasmade" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Get back to me when one of them can tell me when a politician just lied and who paid for the lie.
Re:A start but no more (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm more concerned that everything entered has to be relayed to a central processing center in order to figure out what's said.
Dammit I want my device to be able to determine what I'm saying locally. I mean, is this too much to ask? We had text-to-speech software that ran semi-successfully on Apple Macintosh LC computers with 16-bit, 16-MHz 68020 processors with no floating-point coprocessors and only 4MB RAM. Why haven't we seen any substantial improvement in literally twenty-five years and several orders of magnitude in computing power?
Re: A start but no more (Score:2)
Text-to-speech and speech-to-text are two very, very different operations.
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And which do you think I was talking about?
Regardless though, both are required for a spoken-word user interface. The computer needs to be able to figure out what the user is saying. The computer needs to be able to reply in a way that is understandable.
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True, but speech recognition was available in Macintosh System 7. While it couldn't do dictation, it could understand spoken words from a (small) list.
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https://jasperproject.github.i... [github.io]
Open Source to the rescue. You can use whatever speech recognition engine you want, web based or locally processed. I believe that many of the do-it-yourself home automation people tend to use Sphinx, http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.n... [sourceforge.net]
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Telling you when a politician lied is easy.
Telling you who paid for the lie in specific terms is difficult. Telling who paid for the lie in general terms (eg, some corporation(s) or some entity propped up by corporation(s)) is also easy.
Alexa can tell me how many sides a hexagon has, but cannot tell me the name of a polygon with six equal sides. Google Home can translate miles per hour into a
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...Get back to me when one of them can tell me when a politician just lied...
That's too easy. Just check to see whether their lips are moving.
Re: wife (Score:4, Funny)
Alexa (Score:3, Funny)
"Alexa, play "The Guns of Brixton, by the Clash"
"Im sorry, Portsmouth FC are not playing today"
True story.
HAL 9000 (Score:2)
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I prefer John de Lancie... (Score:1)
HAL 9000 (Score:1)
Seriously, not an option? Poor /.
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hmm, yeah, that's what I call Alexa too.
Old fart here (Score:4, Funny)
I've been yelling at mechanical devices for years.
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Anything but Cortana (Score:2)
If you have an assistant... (Score:1)
... you should be able to ask it to make you a coffee. This never works with Google. Cortana is even worse. And Siri just spills sugar all over the side and uses lukewarm water.
CmdrTaco (Score:2)
Well who else could I vote for?
Maybe one day (Score:1)
No choice for "none"? (Score:2)
The only one I've tried was Siri on my iPhone, but I've never had it do anything useful. The searches and directions it's provided are always wrong.
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Ask her where the nearest Mercedes/Toyota/[car manufacturer of your choice] garage is. I live in Europe and according to Siri the nearest Mercedes garage is in California, almost halfway across the fucking planet.
Siri (Score:2)
I only have experiences with Siri and I must say it's horrendously bad. The worst one she pulled was when I had a tire blow whilst driving on the motorway. I parked the car and waited in the dark for help, and to pass the time I thought I'd ask Siri how long I still had to drive to my home. She told me that it was less than 500 m to my current location.
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Time to broaden your experience!
Siri is good at telling jokes and wisecracks. That's about it. Apple was first to demonstrate the idea of a voice assistant, but it took Google and Amazon to make them actually work.
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I remember when I first saw an iPhone with Siri. It belonged to a coworker and he let me try it. I asked it where I could get a blow job and it brought up a list of escort services. I think 4 or 5 of my coworkers had a new iPhone the next day.
I use Hal 9000 (Score:2)
SB's white Pepper humanoid looking kiosk (Score:1)
Megaphone (Score:2)
LCARS (Score:2)
Computer, cross index all references to pre-first contact human voice assistants against usability matrices and ergonomic functionality ratings.
Other (Score:1)
Obviously.
Poisoning the corpus (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been thinking a little about experimenting with Mycroft: https://mycroft.ai/ [mycroft.ai] the only fairly developed open source one that I can see, but I really don't want my private life harvested and commercialised.
GERTY (Score:2)
GERTY FOR PRESIDENT
The emoticon is genius - not sure why all our AIs are faceless.
Cowboy Neal. (Score:1)
Red Dwarf's Holly (Score:1)
Clint's Magnum Artificial Int (Score:2)
Based on the persona of Clint Eastwood movies, this app hurls customized abuse back at you whenever you request anything indulgent:
"Clint, I want some ice cream."
"Deserving ice cream's got nothing to do with it, boy."
"Clint, find the shortest route to Atlantic City."
"Considering the high rates of gambling addiction in your family, you have to ask yourself, 'Do I feel lucky?' Well do ya, *punk*?"
etc.
Hound (Score:2)
So far, this one is winning. But only just. https://soundhound.com/hound [soundhound.com]
HAL9000, of course. (Score:2)
What else would you have on your IoT home-running, fully accessible to the internet with no filtering, computer? :)
Beat up Martin (Score:2)
Eat up Martha
I really miss.. (Score:2)
Orac [wikipedia.org]. :)
Vlingo, of course (Score:2)
Best voice assistant! (Score:1)
My bernese mountain puppy, though so far she only assists with sitting, lying down, and staying.
How to kill? (Score:1)
How to remove /disable/ kill voice activated assistants?