Comment by ben_w
7 days ago
> This is also why most voice assistants don't get used very much, there's no easily accessible list of phrases they know and they aren't smart enough to really understand what the person wants, so people end up using the one or two phrases they know the assistant can handle and forget about it otherwise.
Thank you for saying this, you've just made me realise they share all the problems of text adventures while having none of the excitement.
I was actually complaining about this the other day: there is no manual (or even a searchable database) of recognized commands/features. I often discover that something was possible with Google Assistant when the announcement comes that it's being removed.
When you start a timer with Siri, it often announces that you can also tell it to stop the timer by saying stop. This tells me that even the most rudimentary functions of starting and stopping timers is not yet learned by users. Every time I hear that message I think of how much of a failure this whole thing has been.
Oh timers, you mean the one thing I use daily for cooking where they changed the recognized phrase between iOS 17 and iOS 18? It used to understand "notify me in 15 minutes" meant to set a timer. Now it asks for what I want to be reminded about to add it to the calendar. I have to explicitly say "set a 15-minute timer".
So long for muscle memory (oh and for consiseness, it's worse in French).
Anyways, that's the prime reason there's no list: either they want to change the commands willy-nilly, or they don't know them because that's whatever the model's learned.
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It’s a disconnect between the vision and the reality. Users shouldn’t have to learn Siri, it should just work every time no matter how you ask as long as it’s understandable to a person.
But the reality is it doesn’t work and users have to specifically learn the few things it can do.
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