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Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant Desperately Want To Help You Do Your Routine -- But it Takes Too Much Programming and There Are Still Too Many Holes (wsj.com)
Google's Assistant and Amazon's Alexa are rapidly increasing their reach, and Apple's Siri is supposedly getting smarter. But all of these AI assistants are still too clumsy in day to day. David Pierce, writing for WSJ: My virtual assistant desperately wants to help me. Google Assistant, Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri -- even Samsung's Bixby and others -- have begun allowing users to set up "routines" that combine many actions into a single command. Shout "OK Google, good morning!" at your smart speaker and it can (in theory) open the blinds, turn on the lights, show you traffic and your calendar and turn on NPR. Tell Alexa to start a dance party, and watch it turn on the disco ball and fire up the "Glitter and Glowsticks" playlist. These routines embody what virtual assistants are meant to do, connecting all our gadgets and services and making everything work together. All you have to do is ask. And maybe not even that -- these tools aim to get to know you so well, they'll anticipate your needs. But these multistep systems are complicated to create, and they often require buying "smart" accessories and memorizing specific phrases.
In most cases, voice-controlled assistants have hit a wall where they perform a specific set of tasks well and not much else. They may be crazy ambitious, but they aren't ready to take on real work. If you are willing to do some finagling, there are already ways to make your devices and services work together better. Tools like IFTTT and Zapier let you connect web services, so you can automatically save every photo you share on Instagram into a Dropbox folder, or file your sales contacts into a spreadsheet. [...] All these tools offer sample routines, and I recommend trying a few. If you want to create a specific routine from scratch, just know: It's hard. It feels like putting together Ikea furniture without the instructions -- most of the pieces are there, but good luck building something that stands up. [...] A sufficiently smart home should observe and adapt to your needs. That kind of proactive, thoughtful help is a long way off. It will require computers that understand far more about us than they do now.
In most cases, voice-controlled assistants have hit a wall where they perform a specific set of tasks well and not much else. They may be crazy ambitious, but they aren't ready to take on real work. If you are willing to do some finagling, there are already ways to make your devices and services work together better. Tools like IFTTT and Zapier let you connect web services, so you can automatically save every photo you share on Instagram into a Dropbox folder, or file your sales contacts into a spreadsheet. [...] All these tools offer sample routines, and I recommend trying a few. If you want to create a specific routine from scratch, just know: It's hard. It feels like putting together Ikea furniture without the instructions -- most of the pieces are there, but good luck building something that stands up. [...] A sufficiently smart home should observe and adapt to your needs. That kind of proactive, thoughtful help is a long way off. It will require computers that understand far more about us than they do now.
...because the AI we have now are parlor tricks and there is no strong AI yet.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I go to a friend's house, and he's got an Alexa (not sure which product), and he'll ask it to play music, which I'm more than capable of doing with a button or two on my iPod, and he'll say "Alexa, put milk on the grocery list," which I can do with a pencil and the pad hanging on the fridge. Somehow the joyous fangledness of these devices has passed me by. I have no interest. Zero.
open the pod bay doors
Ever met an assistant that didn't need a year of training? Any assistant anywhere?
Assistant coach, executive assistant, teacher's assistant, lab assistant?
How about a protege? Oh wait, that's actually an assistant-in-training. . .for years.
Sorry friend, but you won't get anyone/anything/anybody to do what you want without telling them, showing them, and correcting them. And that takes time, by you.
Tough.
Oh yeah, and if it doesn't require _you_ to teach your assistant what you want, then it isn't your assistant, you're it's assistant. By definition. Because it's telling you how to behave.
"Desperately Want To Help You Do Your Routine"
all they want, all they care about, is the money they make off your data, and the commissions/sales generated.
they don't give a shit about your life or your routine.
This shit gives me the Yikes.
Are people REALLY into putting these crap technology inside their houses for "helping doing stuff"? For Christ Sakes!
I really don't see the point with these devices. Useless for me.
Lame.
In Putinist Russia, Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant DO YOU!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
NO!! Get the f*** out of my life! My phone will not babysit me like my f***ing socialism gouvernment do (I'm from Canada)!
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
In most cases, voice-controlled assistants have hit a wall where they perform a specific set of tasks well and not much else. They may be crazy ambitious, but they aren't ready to take on real work.
(bold mine...)
When these things can't do much more than repetitive tasks, they are gimmicks designed to fleece "zealots" of their hard earned cash in my opinion.
Those that used to use some of these gadgets at my office threw them away long ago after realizing that they had no real utility. Unfortunately, that wasn't before they parted with serious hard earned cash.
Aye, there's the rub.
In theory, we want our assistants to know us well enough to be able to anticipate things. Yes, I want my assistant to pour a fresh cup of coffee for me when I come downstairs in the morning. And I don't want to have to have CS Degree in order to do this.
The problem is in the realms of security. I don't want my assistant sharing my coffee preferences and/or wasting my time by letting me know that some other brand of coffee is on sale this week and it's just as good as the coffee I drink now and why don't I order that?
for an assistant named HAL 9000
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
It's very cool that you can set lights to come on at dusk.
It's also very cool that you can set lights to turn on when you come home.
In fact, I've got it set to turn on most of the house lights when I get home to full light and then off and to turn on to warm light at dusk (or a night light after 10pm)
Here's the kicker - the entire system doesn't understand previous states - so if you're out of the house after dusk the lights come on to warm light but when you come home, the lights come on at full on then turn off and STAY OFF - because that was the last script ran. There's no rules priority or return to previous state capability.
Auto-off is just as strange as well as the max "auto off" time for any light scene is 1 hour (at least through the various UIs). So I can't have a "lights on at sunset for 6 hours" scenario - I have to have TWO separate configurations - lights on at sunset, then lights off at midnight.
Don't forget about me. A little sign in here, a touch of WiFi there, and I can spy on you while don't absolutely nothing of value.
If you install lots of me, I still won't be of any use, but at least it'll be mildly amusing.
I bet you wear Prada, don't you?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Over Christmas vacation, I saw my eight year old nephew use Google to avoid parental blocking on YouTube videos his parents didn't want him to watch, and use ever more creative ways to even hack my sister's phone to do the same thing.
Be careful what you ask for.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I gave up on "home automation" when X10 was still a thing. The only thing these big players have added beyond clap-on/clap-off is a computer to spy on you. These things claiming to be "AI", yet they haven't the slightest clue that a holiday calls for alternative actions, UNLESS you meticulously program it to have alternative actions on a holiday. "Let's have a party" has completely different meaning to the average socialized human depending on if it is Oct 30 vs Dec 30
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
It may be a good long time before computers have "common sense". But I wonder if enough pattern matching can be thrown at the applications that they are "good enough" for common tasks? If they sample enough requests from enough people they can probably narrow down an appropriate action based on similar responses from many other people.
How far can brute-force pattern matching carry these things? Putting common sense into these is of course the ideal, but until that Great Barrier is cracked, companies will try to push the limits of pattern matching. It will be interesting to see how far it can go.
Regardless, it may require a lot of personal info like the name of your family members, marriage status, what rooms are in your house, typical schedules (work, school, etc.), if you have stairs, if you have pets, etc.
Then again, a human butler would also need to know such to avoid asking redundant questions and to understand basic context. The difference is a butler is less likely to share such info with pesky marketers and dictators.
Table-ized A.I.
These virtual assistants don't want anything, they are literally incapable of wanting. However, the corporations behind them desperately want to integrate them into people's lives. To call their motives nefarious is an understatement because they are downright diabolical. Consider, really consider what they are trying to do with these devices. The growing reliance on smartphones was mostly a fluke that they exploited but this is an intentional effort to do something similar but exploit it in minimalist fashion. It seems hyperbolic on the firsthand but when you give it some thought about the total lack of boundaries these devices have (remotely updated without consent to do anything) then you can see the tip of the iceberg.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Reminds me of Dragon Naturally Speaking that my boss in a law firm had me install on his computer -- complete with a legal vocabulary.
Comes time to train the goddam thing and he tries to get ME to do it.
After some discussion that failed to inform, I just did what he said. I told him to get up so I could do it for him. He said he had work to do, so install it on my computer; train it, and get back to him when it was ready.
I explained, slowly, how that doesn't work but he insisted.
I did as he said and when he was ready, I told him to go into my office. He said he wanted it on his computer. I reminded him of how that went down.
He huffed off to my computer room, sat down and started dictating into Word. Of course, the translation was stupid. He asked how in hell it would ever work and I said, it's trained to my voice.
"I'll sit in here and you tell me what you want and I'll inform my computer."
He didn't even ask me to uninstall it from his computer.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
There are two things at play here. Assistants and voice command. Voice command is straight forward. You issue a command, the computer executes it. Assistants want to pretend to be human to do the same thing. Its super weird. I would like to see a LOT more voice command and no assistants.
Good-bye
Pretty sure China will make these listening devices mandatory in all homes and businesses.
... for personal computers.
"Look! It even balances my checkbook!!!"
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
There are already better answers for these things. This is what your smart home hub is for. You are always going to have a poor experience on these things if you are connecting your voice assistant to things like hue, lifx, nest, harmony hub, etc directly. The answer is to integrate all those devices into a flexible and open smart controller like Home assist, Vera, etc and then integrate that and only that with your voice assistant(s).
That way you get a clean and modular system. You'll still have to learn the commands to some extent but because everything is presented to the voice assistant via one plugin/skill/service/whatever the syntax across devices will be uniform and consistent. Have an Alexa and GA or Sirii? Np, those things just talk to the same smart controller, state remains consistent and uniform, Everything and it's dog is including smart features but if you set up multiple things to control the same devices directly you are just asking for trouble.
Besides, if you are ever going to be serious about a smart home you can't use wifi for all your devices, wifi doesn't scale well to high client counts.
If I go to somebody else's house that has one of these things, all I have to do is to say, "Alexa, order one case of XY lube. Ship overnight." or some silly shit like that. The stupid things get unplugged every time I do that.
I don't respond to AC's.
To the extent I have interest, it is to close gaps not conveniently with a button.
It's very frivilous, like dimming lights from couch, or my roku remote is approximately two buttons shy of doing what I want with my entertainment system, and voice commands might bebetter than juggling another remote for just two buttons.
Of course I'm more interested in Snips and keeping the voice control within the house. I do not want to be going along with the fallacy that I need hot mics into Amazon or google's datacenter to do this simple stuff.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I bought a Google assistant a few months ago, just after it became available in my native language. The one thing that surprised me is that I can't teach it anything. It's supposed to learn, but I can't speed up the learning process by explaining it what I want. Why can't I use my voice to tell it what kind of routines I want? Why is it not possible to teach it synonyms?
They remain what they have been from day one: good for grins and giggles, party games - and very little more. The example given in the summary is a good one: I can do those tasks myself to my satisfaction with very little effort. For the most part, Alexa, Google Assistant, etc. solve problems that don't really exist, or that are so easy to solve with very little effort. They are utterly useless when it comes to trying to get them to do things where even a minimum of ambiguity is involved. Or even when no ambiguity is present: it seems to be beyond Google Assistant's capabilities to make phone calls using the mechanism I specify - e.g. Hangouts (or something else) as opposed to my voice plan. Plus it is pathetic (and comical) how little understanding is involved: ask them NOT to give you the weather forecast under any circumstances, and they will all immediately proceed to give you the weather forecast.
In summary, they are cute gimmicks, but, as of today, far, far less useful than we have been told.
How about breaking it into steps? Start out by having a control center that you tell it what textual commands do: a command-line interface. Thus, "Dim the front lights" will trigger a set of macros that dim the lights that you select and set to your selected brightness amount.
When the text commands are tested and work right, you THEN hook it up to the voice assistant. It may take some feedback training to make sure it interprets them right. It may pronounce a list of multiple candidate matches and ask which you intended if it has problems finding a "clean" match. After time it could learn your pronunciation pattern for a given command and stop giving you those multiple options. You can also set up a "synonym list" to cross-translate similar ways of saying the same thing. You may also want to create custom feedback responses to make sure it interpreted you correctly, such as "All front 4 lights have been dimmed to 40 percent" or the like. Or just play Beatles tune snippets that you associate with your lights. "She came in through the bathroom window" for example. (Inspired by an overzealous climbing fan.)
You may need to have the voice assistant distinguish between your custom commands versus general pre-canned commands like "what's the weather tomorrow"? Maybe a name like "Ralph" will trigger the custom bot, and "Alexa" the standard commercial bot.
Sure, it's a fair amount of work, but most "auto-house" people are fiddling hobbyists anyhow. Package them with good samples and virtual testing kits. If the interfaces are standardized, then each vender doesn't have to provide a voice assistant, just a command-line interface to hook up to another vendor's voice assistant.
In general I believe AI will have to learn to component-tize its processes in order to better tune, study, and dissect results. It's why alternatives to neural-nets, such as factor tables (see sig below), should be explored more. Neural nets have arguably been the first big practical AI breakthrough, but we seem to be hitting a wall with them and need look around wider for other tools.
I took an AI course in the late 1980's, and there were several techniques described that one could apply. No one technique can probably do the job by itself; good AI will probably take multiple techniques, and the industry needs practice glueing multiple techniques to triangulate answers and split the load up. Modularizing techniques is to both better understand & tune the intermediate results, and to allow mixing and matching the best-of-breed or best-fit-for-the-job. Modularization is what made the PC clones take off: you could buy monitors, disk drives, printers, add-on cards, etc. from many different vendors. AI seems still in the mid-70's where vendors tried to control the whole personal computing environment.
Lone-wolf bots won't cut it. Even if lone-wolf bots end up working, they may be too difficult to extract their reasoning steps from. It may be great job security for the one mop-headed professor who understands the gizmo, but if AI is to spread, then tool-type specialists without PhD's will need to be leveraged.
Table-ized A.I.
These are smart devices, not intelligent devices.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
So, after decades of work by our brightest minds and biggest egos, we can not build a thinking program? Maybe until then, some of the smaller problems could be reviewed? Like 3D Printing Medicine?
You're full of shit.
I'm from Texas and the program works.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I've had a Samsung Galaxy S8 now for almost 18 months and I still haven't agreed to the Bixby terms of service which pop up from time to time (mostly as a result of accidentally pressing that damned Bixby button). It would be nice if I could remove the darned thing altogether (as well as some other shovelware) but since I can't, ain't no way I'm gonna agree to it. It can stay there in its (hopefully) unconfigured state forever.
Smeg-head.
look, companies have started just calling normal database automatic data processing programs as AI. like, it's so bad it has gone down to calling tiller databases ai. it's stupid.
you make a script to notify you that the disk is going to be full soon? congratulations you're now an AI developer in 2019.
And the fucking media is gobbling it up. Anyhow, 99% of the rise of "AI".
I mean, fuck, it's gone to the point where excel sheets are essentially said to be "AI" now. An access database from 1998 would be "deep learning".
like the fuck.. anyhow, there have been actual advantages in image/shape matching. but even then, if they really had that down _pat_ then tell me this: Why the fuck can't I have automatic OCR text translation for Thai writing? like, surely you could just automate the "ai" learning for it with a bunch of fonts? surely? if you can teach an "ai" to try enough combinations to win go and guess which trees to follow, can't you just make something with at least some commercial appeal and make it read thai?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Post earlier in the evening.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.