Comment by gmueckl
7 days ago
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.
This is why I call these voice "commands" spells. They feel very much like a spell. You have to remember them, and if you don't remember 'em exactly, they don't do what you expect. Siri (and Alexa for that matter) is a big failure. After 12 years of having a voice "assistant" in my pocket, I still don't use it for anything important and/or useful.
>I have to explicitly say "set a 15-minute timer".
Only saying "15 minutes" initiates a timer for that long.
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It's not a huge deal, but on google devices, setting a timer is different from setting an alarm. the end result is more or less the same thing, but it uses different underlying functionality and I have to remember to say timer instead of alarm when I'm cooking.
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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.
It's a disconnect because we have this vision that language (as commonly spoken, not legalese) is perfectly clear and precise. But the reality is that even two live people who seem to speak the same language will misunderstand each other, including for "basic" things. So how should a computer be able to read your mind, when it most likely doesn't even have the context of where you're from?
Regarding the "notify" vs "timer", I had a very similar experience with a friend. I went to a bakery, and she asked me to get her some kind of pastry. To me, she meant some kind of bread. Queue confused faces on both sides when she asked where her stuff was. Sure, it's still in the broad "baked goods" category, just like a reminder and a timer. This was in France, both living in major cities 200 km apart. It's not like some extreme variation of English from the other side of the world.
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