No idea I don't have Spotify or use any google assistant stuff, but i'm guessing it's supposed to make it so if you try to open google play music using a voice assistant, it'll instead play that album from Spotify. Maybe as a joke, maybe as a way to try and get a bunch of artificial listens.
It’s generic filler music. It exists so that the uploader gets paid when someone says “OK Google play music” and the voice assistant inadvertently pulls up the album.
My fucking Google Home can't even figure out how to play the auto playlist "My Likes" on YouTube Music.
Previously, I could say "Play my Thumbs Up" and it could do so on Google Play Music.
It keeps playing a song called "My Likes". Jesus fucking Christ, Google. If I say "Play my My Likes playlist" something random happens.
Do these guys even use their product? I'm just glad this album didn't come out before the forced migration.
EDIT: Okay, I went to verify it and this has to be the best instance of massive PEBKAC plus some UX donkeyness. The auto playlist is called "Your Likes" so I can get the Assistant to do the right thing by telling her to play her likes (Ok Google, play your likes). What the fuck man. But fine. At least I got it working.
I've suffered with this for months and now I find a solution in the few minutes after posting this.
It really has. Google Play Music integrated so well with everything. YT Music has the massive advantage that there is so much more music on YouTube but damn, the integration is shambolic.
Yeah but Gmail is one of the easiest things to leave (if you have your own domain). There are high-quality alternatives and moving is a half hour of work.
YTM is completely worthless if you have/had a family plan with GPM. My kids basically lost all of their access to music as Youtube itself is not available to kids, no matter how hard you try or how often a parent enters their password.
In classic Internet tradition, you basically need to setup a shadow Google account where you lie about their age and add them to your family account anyway. Thanks Google!
Wait til you discover that the web version of YTM can't chromecast. Yep, Google's own music product can't communicate with Google's own music player product.
The "solution" is to cast the tab. Which means lower bitrate, no music controls, and if you cast to a display device, the whole tab screencasts etc.
I guess it's because nobody important uses the web anymore? Or something?
(Disclaimer: I work at Google. But not on YTM. Most Googlers I know have switched to Spotify, including myself.)
Apparently the new brand for speakers and displays with Google Assistant is now "Nest" -- as far as I can tell the Nest Mini and Nest Hub are the same hardware (?) as the Google Home Mini and the Google Home Hub. (And the "Nest Audio" is the new version of what was the original "Google Home".)
If you view the “Nest” brand as a thermostat brand, it doesn’t make sense. But if you view it as a “smart home” brand, it makes sense. However, rebranding to a different product name never makes much sense. It just confuses the public.
This is a very interesting theory, I don't know if this was revealed somehow but considering how consistently terrible the guesses are on assistant devices... I wouldn't be surprised.
Why would a live version of a song pay less royalties than the studio version? Similarly for the instrumental version. The only one that seems like it would pay less royalties is maybe the cover, if the cover band has a weaker royalty rate with the provider.
I think the far more likely explanation is just that these home assistant products suck.
My assumption has always been that Alexa, Assistant etc. just have really naive sorting of results - if I search on Spotify, the song results for 'War Pigs' are returned with the album version second, but I know that's what I meant.
YTM seems to prefer youtube over their music catalog. It's not hard to extrapolate from there. Wouldn't a live cover recorded and uploaded by some random person pay less than the official version from WB?
Because the studio version is a top 200 of all time album, and the live version from the 50th anniversary "Still Kickin'" Tour with 30% of the original lineup and 20% of the original vocal range?
This is a larger GIGO problem with the music industry these days. It's not a shortcoming of voice assistants in particular. Ever use Spotify? Sometimes it seems that 9 out of 10 albums returned by any given search are live versions, heavily-doctored remastered editions, or remix collections.
I have a friend that works for one of the major assistants not made in MountainView... there is explicit logic where it looks if the song title includes "live | cover | instrumental | etc" and tries to find a new version.
Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
The concept is named after Ward Cunningham, father of the wiki. According to Steven McGeady, the law's author, Wikipedia may be the most well-known demonstration of this law.
Cunningham's Law can be considered the Internet equivalent of the French saying "prêcher le faux pour savoir le vrai" (preach the falsehood to know the truth). Sherlock Holmes has been known to use the principle at times (for example, in The Sign of the Four.)
It's not until just now that I realized the irony inherent in my reply. What the person I was replying to did was to "post the wrong answer", and I was uncontrollably impelled to enact the very phenomenon I was describing, completely unaware I was doing so.
Whether unintentional or not, it has put a huge smile on my face.
BTW, the entirety of my post after the URL is simply quoting from that page. I would have liked to have remembered to put ">" in front of those paragraphs so it was clear that I didn't write all of that, but c'est la vie.
I find that usually having a second set of eyes when you do it again usually forces the person to focus, whereas when it wasn't working before they probably had something else on the brain or were on autopilot. I like to call it the IT magic touch or job security.
In a previous job, we used to joke about having a life sized cardboard cutout of the lead engineer left in the head end. Things would not be working "nominally" to the point we needed help. As soon as the engineer would walk in, the erratic behavior would stop. We joked that the equipment only behaved that way when he was not in the room. We wanted to test the theory to see if the equipment knew him or would be fooled by the cutout. You know, for science. Nobody was vested enough to actually pay to have it done though.
I thought the same but it literally doesn't work for me. Just tried it. It plays something random. I tried it on my phone to see what it was doing and it picked "my supermix" once and the song "my likes" the next time.
It feels like a trope to even say it but it amazes me how badly Google have handled the transition from Google Play Music to YT Music. For me YT Music is an inferior experience in every single way.
One big annoyance for me is that every song I play now shows up in my YouTube history. For me, watching videos on YT and listening to music are activities I do in two very different contexts, mixing them together in a list serves no purpose and makes it a lot more difficult to navigate.
And on mobile GPM had a very simple functionality: a playlist containing all the songs you've downloaded offline. To the best of my knowledge YTM has no such thing, just a playlist _it makes for you_ of offline songs.
When Google Play started a "radio station" based on a song, the songs that came after were changed on each iteration based on your likes/dislikes. Maybe they just shuffled the same list each time, but it kept it feeling fresh. When you ask YouTube Music to play a song, the same set of songs will always come after. Not very good for similar song discovery.
They moved my favorite songs to one of my THREE youtube profiles.
They couldn't move it to my main because it was legacy, but that was where I had youtube premium/red whatever. So then I needed to switch between accounts. Not fun while you are driving.
Oh then they stopped premium so I started hearing ads. Not what I want when I'm trying to calm my screaming kid in the car. Oh, and I need to keep my phone screen on.
Many of the songs aren't the same as on Google play.
Google seems to be moving toward search/email/YouTube. With few other products. Probably good, they can't handle it.
Google Play Music was so trash but I stuck with it because I had too many tracks sent by friends/my own on it (which Google Play would randomly delete altogether at times).
When they forced the transition to YouTube music, I gave up the service for good.
I've been wondering whether I should re-enable siri and give it an other shot. I use the todos app for that and from time to time it would be convenient to do it handsfree.
I see that I still have no reason to bother, it's going to frustrate me more than anything else (especially with how downhill voiceover has gone in 12).
Basically the main use of Siri for me is lighting---it isn't so bad at setting HomeKit lights scenes---and, with recent shortcuts capability increases, hitting external APIs.
The latter point is a bit broader: now that Siri can hit an arbitrary URL via shortcuts, you can really just set your own trigger phrase to do anything that can be automated. You better believe I have a raspberry pi on order which will be running a local webserver...
May as well just give it a try for yourself and see how you get on. I use Siri all the time to build shopping lists, set reminders (including reminders with alerts), etc. I have no problems with it. I also have no problem issuing the exact command parent poster is having trouble with.
We have a HomePod in the kitchen and its (in my experience) pretty flawless. I empty the milk and I just say 'Hey Siri add milk to the groceries list' and she says 'Ok, added to your groceries list'. If I mumble or stutter things can go off the rails. Also inline editing of my statements causes problems (like where you start saying one word and realizing its the wrong word and swapping it mid-sentence)
I also never have issues and, based on the replies, I'm wondering if the Homepod is the difference. It seems like people using the Homepod as a hub have better luck than those just using their phones.
I use Google Keep for that :). Share it with my wife, we both have the widget in our phone desktops (or whatever the home screen is called). Works very nice.
Oh, God, I have a google apps account on my phone, along-side my regular one, and I once spent three days trying to debug an issue where OK Google had become super-crippled, only to find out it had somehow switched to using my other account.
I don't use it with OK Google, I just type the stuff. All I need to do is unlock the phone, swipe right to the next home screen, click the giant widget and type.
> You bring the whiteboard to the grocery store with you?
I take a photo with my phone. It's not perfect because to mark things off you'd have to use the photo-editing on the phone which would be rather clunky for that purpose. But it works if you don't mind checking things off in your head.
> How do you keep it from getting erased?
I've got a glass whiteboard and use liquid chalk markers. It's tough to accidentally erase something with those.
when i was a working chef, i used this NON-STOP. it is actually the first real “tech” i’ve ever brought into a (real working) kitchen that provided real value instead of gimmick
I miss the days of instruction manuals. Alexa has always (?) supported concurrent timers but it wasn't until recently that it started asking me if I want to name my timers. But it tries to be "smart" and only ask me when it thinks I need to name them.
I only figured out through trial and error that I can name my Alexa timers without waiting for it to prompt me:
> Alexa, set a pasta timer for 10 minutes
> - Pasta timer, 10 minutes, starting now.
> Alexa, cancel pasta timer
> - Pasta timer canceled
Alexa is mostly good with timers/alarms, but occasionally will swap 15/50 or 8/80.
If you miss hearing the distinction in the confirmation, you'll miss the scheduled event
Edit: They also have distinct classification of alarm/timers. You can use either word to create one but checking what you've set or trying to cancel will result in 'no timers/alarms' set if your request doesn't match their system design.
Fine, you can also say "Set a timer", pause for a hot take, and then say "four minutes" and it's fine. I just tried it and it worked without any issue.
It used to be like this for me too. Recently I can‘t use siri anymore when the ventilation is already running. After I said my sentence it keeps listening to the noise forever until it gives up, even though it understood my first sentence perfectly.
I've had great success with the Google smart speaker with "Hey Google, turn off the Living Room TV".
I do have to specify "Living Room TV", even though the speaker and chromecast are configured to be in the same room, it still just turns off a bedroom tv if I'm not specific about which tv.
Also "Hey Google, turn off the Xbox" works, because I linked that at some point.
There's a setting in Google Home where you can alias which TV a given speaker is paired to as its default so you don't have to name the TV. If you have a device _named_ TV, that goes out the window, though.
No joke, this is the one thing I use my Echo for: as stuff is cooking I set timers for each of them and it works perfectly. It does virtually nothing else well but it's a fantastic keeper of timers.
Google Assistant on my phone just got better at handling timers.
It used to do a cheesy "Starting your timer.... Now", which would have been okay if a bit tedious repeatedly, apart from the fact that actually you could see that the timer started immediately, so the whole delayed "now" thing was completely misleading.
It was like that for well over a year until I noticed it was fixed just recently.
I tried the same and got frustrated. So I said “Siri shut up you piece of garbage” and she added “shut up you piece of garbage” to my grocery list for me. Very helpful.
Also Siri is constantly having problems knowing if I’m talking to my watch or my iPhone, even if my phone is in my pocket.
> Siri is constantly having problems knowing if I’m talking to my watch or my iPhone...
Funnily enough, this is one issue I don’t have: between my phone, watch and iPad I’m consistently impressed at how well it manages to choose the best one - does anyone know if Apple devices actively co-ordinate which one responds to Siri commands?
I don’t use Siri for much, and I certainly don’t have it always listening. But I did hack out a useful Shortcut to record my blood pressure and heart rate to Apple Health.
I say, “Add blood pressure <pause> 120 over 80 plus 60.” Then I use the shortcut to parse the string on the / and +, and record it to Health.
The hard part was finding delimiters that Siri would consistently record as a single character. That and realizing I needed a manual review step to make sure Siri didn’t happily pump garbage into my logs.
I don't use any of these "assistants", but curious if you responded with "Groceries List"? Knowing they work on keywords, to Siri, you may not be actually answering her question.
I was with you until the end. I use Reminders lists that are shared with my wife, we have many many lists for different things. They sync to all my other devices so they're always within 2 seconds of reach. But yes, Siri really can't handle all this, I have to manage it "manually."
Maybe ask her “What did I say?” At least on iPhone, she’ll show you the textual version (and let you type to modify it). Because it sure sounds like she isn’t understanding the word “Groceries”.
I wonder what the difference is. I not only am able to add stuff to my Groceries list 100% of the time but I also have multiple shopping lists so I can say "Add x to my Amazon list" or "Add x to my Costco list" and never have an issue.
I can't understand why I should talk to any of my devices as long as they are as idiotic as they are now and like you describe above doesn't have the slightest idea about how to handle context.
That said Siri feels at least 100 times smarter than Google assistant to me, the below are actual (if somewhat anonymized) examples:
- Google suggestions when I look at the phone at 5am in the morning: "text random friend of a friend that I answered a question for over Telegram" or "call customers project manager". See https://erik.itland.no/tag:aifails for screenshots and more examples. In the years I had access to the future it maybe helped me twice by pointing out it was time to leave for an appointment.
- Siri suggestions are mostly mundane (more or less predictably tells me when to leave for appointments, kids soccer and hockey training etc, suggests picking up kids at kindergarden - although not consistently, suggests sending messages to my wife over our preferred messaging solution, tweeting, or if I drive 5 minutes down to the shopping center: that I should drive home the way I always do etc) but I have never caught it suggesting outright idiotic things like Google, and once this weekend it even suggested something semi-smart (a text message to my wife that was surprisingly close to one I could have written myself to tell her I was on my way home, including one of my rather unusual abbreviations and with good timing :-)
I agree. Google is collecting all of this data, but every time I'm going to Wegmans, "hey google, navigate to wegmans", its always, "I FOUND SEVERAL OPTIONS, WHICH WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO TO?". And in what is apparently always a surprise, I always want to go to closest Wegmans.
I know how to get to work, and yet I enter it into my satnav every day because it then avoids traffic.
TomTom had this solved eons ago - my TomTom 5000 from 2014 automatically sets destination as work when I get in the car in the morning, and home when I'm done with work. And it learns my schedule per day, so it doesn't do that on the weekends, or if I need to pop out somewhere at lunch. Such a simple feature from 6 years ago works better than anything that Google can seemingly come up with.
That's what Android Auto does in my car as well-- as soon as I turn the on the car on a weekday morning, it gives me directions & traffic to work. Ditto for the commute home.
I remember back in ~93, my dad told me that the Mac we had just bought had voice recognition. He warned me -- quite jokingly -- that he had to be careful not to say something like, "mynameisash, please empty the trash" because the computer might hear it and mistakenly delete items in the trash.
Almost 30 years later, how many orders of magnitude faster silicon and countless person-hours of research and I can't get my damn phone (which, yes, _is_ a marvel that way-back-when-me wouldn't believe) to recognize, "call mrs_mynameisash" when I'm using my hands-free while driving. I don't know how many times Google's voice assistant has called some (possibly local?) T-Mobile instead. And my wife's name sounds nothing like "T-Mobile".
I remember, when I was a wee little lad back in '96, playing on an old Mac Plus with a black and white screen. Even then we had software installed that would let us control the old Mac Plus with our voice. It was the first time I'd ever used a boom microphone.
My dad insisted that a boom microphone was required -- not just any microphone but a "boom" microphone specifically. It was interesting when I showed him some smaller microphones years later that worked better with less noise.
Oh man have I grown since. Hardware and processing power have both grown so much. But speech recognition is still as dumb (or even dumber) as it was 30 years ago. It certainly didn't need the internet to work back then!
Since half this thread gives workarounds, and since I had the same problem, I'll share my workaround: you can tell Google that a particular contact is your wife. There's a "relationship" field in contacts. Now I can say "call my wife" and it mostly works, although saying her name is still hopeless.
One of the funniest video on YouTube in my opinion is this 2007 demonstration of voice recognition on Windows Vista for Perl programming. The lad spends the first 4.5 minutes trying to enter „open (INFO“ before typing it out. Absolute classic.
Google is terrific at answering random questions compared to Siri, though. And I use my Alexa products for shopping lists. Not too long ago they added a feature where it tries to figure out what section of the grocery store things are in, and then it groups items on your shopping list into those grocery store sections. It's pretty nice and a simple "alexa, add <whatever> to my shopping list" is pretty bulletproof.
My wife and I use Google Keep + assistants and they work fabulously. We have different lists: Costco, Amazon, Home Depot, Grocery, Alcohol, and the only time we ever have issues is when one of use says the wrong thing.
I built my own with a raspberry pi, touch screen, and tiny webserver (on Hetzner). It doesn't use voice. It works perfectly in the kitchen, and perfectly on my phone while shopping.
Me: Hey Siri, add tomatoes and grapes to the shopping list in Pap-
Siri: I couldn’t find a shopping list, do you want me to create one?
Me: no. Hey Siri, add tomatoes and grap-
Siri: you have to select which app you want to continue <shows 6 apps, including Paprika. I tap Paprika> Sorry, Paprika has not implemented this function yet.
My wife and I have been using an app called Todoist(no affiliation) and have been loving it. Groceries is a shared list either of us can contribute to or check off of at any time.
This is my experience with any 'smart assistant' product that is or ever has been.
It's always frustrating but never particularly hard to find the special incantation that will invoke it to do the thing that you want it to. Overall though it's simply not worth the effort which is probably why I end up using these overwhelmingly complex devices only for their most mundane functions like timers and getting the weather.
Trying for anything moderately complex, and I might as well be asking the dog to do it for me.
This is the same way I feel about Google Maps. Especially with the new streamlined/cards UI. Everything is objectively worse and I can't even force it to act like it used to. Actual, useful functionality has just been lopped off.
Yep. Google has been getting progressively worse at recognizing my words over the past two years. It's also started randomly capitalizing words that aren't proper nouns and seemingly has a blacklist of words that it clearly recognizes as speech but refuses to type such as "o'clock".
"Take a look boss, I made the AI better yet again! After the last change, telemetry shows our users are talking even longer to the assistant each time they use it. Engagement is up, they seem to love interacting with it."
And whoever decided that the Google Assistant "clang!" sound needed to be the loudest, most piercing sound physically possible to generate with a smartphone deserves to be drawn and quartered.
My issue is that I found out the special incantations two years ago, and then they changed (I presume) something about the core language processing logic, and now none of that works.
For example I have Philips Hue lights behind the TV/Screen on my living room wall, and I use their "color loop" behind the screen when watching movies etc. The problem is that "TV", "Television" and "Screen" are semi-protected words, so "turn off tv lights" ends up with the TV being turned off 9/10 times. "We" compromised and those lights are now called "screen wall" lights
As for setting certain lights to "the color loop", what used to be a 90% success rate (the other 10% turning my lights to "the color blue/bloo(p)") will now set the lights of the room I'm currently in to the color loop, which is usually the living room, not the screen wall. Also as recently as this summer I used to be able to set the whole house to "the color loop" this feature recently disappeared. The color loop slowly and nearly imperceptibly fades the colors from red to green to blue etc over several minutes. It's technically part of "hue labs" but it's a "beta feature" that's been available in the product now for over three years so I would argue it is core functionality at this point.
Yeah, my experience is related, in that it seems to think "lamp" and "lights" are synonyms, so I have a lamp in my living room, but "turn off the living room lamp" turns off all the lights in the living room, not just the light called "living room lamp." It's like, at this intermediate level of intelligence that's particularly annoying: too smart to just literally use the names I assigned, but not smart enough to actually intelligently apply synonyms or fuzzy matching. Worst of all possible worlds.
Siri (HomePod) was getting confused with my “turn everything off” incantation, so I’ve changed the name of the ‘scene’ and now when we leave the house we instruct her to “PUT THAT COFFEE DOWN”.
I had to laugh out loud. I suddenly envisioned a future where we slowly developed an arsenal of such workarounds for the flawed automation creeping into every aspect of private and public life, where it reached a point where people just accepted that that's the way things are done. My grandchildren naturally yell "put that coffee down" when leaving the house, because that's just how you turn off everything. Sure there must be some ancient reason why it's exactly that phrase, but who cares? That's how smart people decided AI is supposed to work.
“The Hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy” had a great bit on this in 1979, describing gesture-controlled televisions that randomly changed channel unless you sat perfectly still, etc.
I get this trying to make reminders to add things to the grocery list with Siri. Siri always intercepts it and says "There is no 'Grocery' list. Would you like to make one?"
But I already have a grocery list and a process for it. I just want a reminder to add something to it.
My brain can easily misplace the thought in that time. Especially if I run into problems or am frazzled. I usually just open a note app since it limits the risk of a memory-shattering distraction.
I used to be able to ask Siri: "Hey Siri, please set the lights to green." Then she would obediently set all of the lights to green. Nice, that's my favorite!
Then a few months ago some update was pushed (iOS? Apple Home app? Philips Hue app? Philips Hue Basestation OS? No idea) and now that exact phrase (which has worked for two years) suddenly elicits a response: "OK, which room?" -- followed by a listing of the rooms in which I have devices and a catch-all "Everywhere".
So now I've had to change my incantation: "Hey Siri, please set all of my lights to green."
I'm just waiting for her to start asking "Do you want Lime Green, Aqua Green, or Vomit Green?". Or worse, maybe she'll just give up and say "OK, here's a list of Google results for Green Lights." Maybe even throw a captcha in there asking me to select the green lights at intersections, just for good measure.
Some people claim I live in a cave and green lights match the season. I just thought I'd play the part. Maybe I'll try red next week and see how that goes.
/s
Actually, I set my living room to red because that's my favorite. And I set my dining room to blue because eating is cool. And when you gotta go then just look for the green light in the hallway in front of the bathroom. And my office is definitely purple in the morning to show just how much I want to punch things because I have to work. It's pink in the afternoon because pink noise from the freeway shouldn't be limited to sounds.
At night I set all the lights to 15%. With the colors it's dark enough to not be blinded when I want some water from the kitchen but also bright enough to see the contours of the door knob or kitchen table or dining chair so I don't stab myself with any of the corners while walking blind.
Ahh well I would say that while Philips Hue (name brand) does work well, it is too expensive for the value provided -- by about 2x to 3x. If they were half their current price then I would recommend them to affluent friends and family. If they were a third their price I would recommend them to even the less affluent friends and family. Even then it's significantly more expensive than a plain light bulb (even LED ones) but for that you gain colors and ease of remote use.
I have some colored lights from Eria that have about as good color spectrum and integrate with Zigbee base stations. They were about 1/2 the price of Philips Hue. But the downside is that they don't integrate with Apple Home. Apple Home (and Siri) only recognizes the expensive Philips Hue lights even though the Eria ones are connected to the same Philips Hue base station. So with the Eria lights I just change the colors manually with a third party app on my phone.
And as a bonus as a developer: Philips Hue has an API to work with the devices connected to the base station. It's super fun to tell coworkers about a script that sets my lights in the office (and visible in video meetings) to red because the server in the living room is having trouble. ;)
Yeah, I like my Hue lights, but they are quite pricey. Part of the cost is that are calibrated well, though. If you have a mixture of white temperature and RGBW lights in one room and set a scene, they will mix decently.
They're pretty expensive too especially considering the warranty is pretty short. From their warranty[0]:
> [...] this device will be free from defects in material and workmanship and will operate for 2 years and 3 years for Energy Star certified products, unless a different period is stated in or on the packaging of the product, based on up to 3 hours average working time per day/7 days per week, when used as directed
I don't really know anyone who only uses lights three hours a day, especially when it gets dark pretty early during winter.
I love the fact that I can call out any X11 color name.
For working during the day, my office lamp is "banana mania". For dinner time, the dining room lights are "topaz".
You can also set a light to a color manually, then ask Siri what color it is. (This is how I discovered "banana mania" which is Siri's name for the color Hue calls "concentrate".
> It's always frustrating but never particularly hard to find the special incantation that will invoke it to do the thing that you want it to.
not always. I used to use google play music to play music from my own library in the car. any time I asked it to play a moderately obscure artist, it would interpret that as whatever popular artist had a similar name. it would then play the radio station for that artist, since I didn't have the premium subscription. I found some success with spelling out the artist name letter by letter, but even that consistently failed for certain names.
also sometimes I would say "list albums by X" to help me remember the name of what I wanted. no matter what I tried, it would only list three albums "and others". who could want this behavior? if I ask you to list albums, yes I actually want to hear every single album name!
I'm now paying for YT music (since the free version apparently does not support android auto), and it so far it works flawlessly. infuriating.
Same here. I really wonder how these products sell. The most basic things dont work. And if they are confused, then for real. For about 2 years, when Siri happened to misunderstand the command "Call ..." it would answer "OK, calling you" and actually try to call my own number. This is so weird that it actually feels like someone wrote that piece of code to prank the user.
If these things would actually work, I'd definitely use one regularily. However, whenever I visit an Alexa owner, I realize after a few interactions that I really couldn't be bothered with this stuff.
I think the "taxi" problem is still around with Siri. Put any taxi organisation into your phonebook, and include "taxi" in the name. You will likely not be able to call it with siri, since it insists to search for taxis in your area. Its always the same bug. These things have absolutely no idea about the context. And some hand-crafted rules go haywire after a while, because apparently nobody reviews them. When I got my first iPhone (iOS 5) I put in my date of birth during configuration, and promptly noticed that the german speech synthesizers says Nineteenseventynine when I enter 1979. All aother 4-digit numbers are fine, only 1979 is pronounced english. So apparently someone put this exception in there for a completely bogus reason, and it stayed there. It is still there today, after 8 years.
Because they’re currently better than nothing. My HomePod works 90% of the time. I can create specific scenes for the things she can’t quite figure out.
Being able to walk in to the kitchen and tell her to put the radio or the light or a specific album or a timer on is actually really amazing. Most of the time. Certainly amazing enough to suffer the times she doesn’t want to co-operate, because then I just do that myself which I would have done anyway.
It helps that the HomePod is also a great speaker in its own right, and that it’s one single cylinder with one cord. It’s a very tidy device.
Well, I have a Sonos One SL, so I know why you like the HomePod form factor. but I explicitly got the SL version because I really dont see any use for a voice assistant. I think the success rate of playing specific artists or tracks might be related to how mainstream your choice of music is. In my experience, the success rate is very bad, actually beyond useable.
The only use case I see which has an acceptable failure rate is asking for the time and setting a timer. And even asking for the time fails about 1/10 times with the Alexa system my gf has in her flat...
And if asking for the time is the only thing which works decently, well, that is really telling about the state of the art...
My toddler wants to hear a song 1000x, I can't do something like "Play 5 little monkeys jumping on the bed on repeat or in a loop or 10x" I have to tell it each time.
yeah but what happens when they want to listen to surfin bird on repeat the next day and banana phone on repeat the day after that? awfully clunky workflow.
A UI with next to zero discoverability and an incredibly broad input set ("all speech") must really work for most conceivable inputs, or only die-hard enthusiasts will keep trying.
I think we need something extremely close to AGI for natural interfaces to work.
Similar story for self-driving cars: car driving helpers/assistants (lane keeping, etc.) are ok, self-driving cars will be a huge disaster until we are really close to AGI.
These are the things where getting 80-90% there isn't enough. We're smarter than chimps or other animals because we can cover the long tail of events.
> It's always frustrating but never particularly hard to find the special incantation that will invoke it to do the thing that you want it to.
I think magical incantations is a perfect way to think about it. Using voice assistants feels more like the land of Harry Potter than the land of technology we live in. It's the flipside of “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
I don’t even bother using them for timers anymore since it’s usually easier to do it on my watch. Voice assistants are limited to navigation requests while driving for me
It's all just a big charade from these companies, as if they ever work. Billions of dollars made from devices that don't even work, but people buy them because they've been lead to believe they work. They're worse than useless, because they give you hope that they actually do what the companies say they do. What a sham. Maybe in another 10-20 years.
It's like someone took the maddening random guesswork user experience of mid-80s text adventures, mixed in mediocre speech-to-text and decided to base an entire product category around it. I absolutely do not get it.
Outside of setting a timer, I've kinda given up on voice commands.
My tolerance for mistakes for simple commands that work sometimes / are the right command ... but don't work is ultra low.
Like how is it my Android phone will default to just googling "exact valid voice command letter for letter" (it's used in a commercial for cripes sake!) ... and not somehow notice that?
Most "Ok Google" assistance feels like a gimmick to me, but here's something very simple I'd love to have working:
I watch a lot of YouTube on my phone when cooking, I even built a cardboard stand for my phone for this reason. What I want is for YT to respond to these voice commands:
- Pause video.
- Play video.
- Rewind 10 seconds.
- Skip the (expletive) ad <-- ok, I can understand why this one might not work.
Sadly, this doesn't work. And it's the only voice assistance I really need :(
I've been playing around with a Nest Hub Max, and with that you can pause/play a video by holding your hand like a stop sign in front of it. Kind of gimmicky, but occasionally useful.
Was also curious about your use cases on the phone (aside from ad skip), and they actually worked for me. I'm using a pixel 4, though wouldn't think that'd make a difference.
"Hey Google pause/unpause youtube" and "Hey Google skip/rewind 30 seconds on youtube" work on my android phone. So I don't know why you say it doesn't work.
If you take a look at recent neural net papers for dialogue and question answering you'll see amazing things. It is really mind boggling they don't improve the commercial product, maybe it's still too expensive to run for the general public.
Similarly, they say English language Search is powered by Transformers. But when I want to perform searches it often switches the intent to something wrong. It's a blunt tool, not a precision instrument.
I have endless frustrations with Google Assistant / Google Now / Whatever they call it now. A few examples:
1. I have my phone set up to trust bluetooth in my car and unlock my phone. I get in the car and say "okay google, open spotify" -- this is so that it will continue playing what I was listening to before I left work.
"Okay", she says, and then tells me that she can't do that because my screen is locked. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it does not.
2. When I had Google Play Music it reliably would play random sub-par covers of songs rather than the original, even when I specified the artist.
3. Sometimes it decides to rely on screen input instead of audio controls. I can't do that while I'm driving.
4. It sometimes ends voice input too early or does voice input inconsistently. I've sent messages to my wife saying "I'm on my way home exclamation point" instead of "I'm on my way home!"
5. Commands which have worked for months suddenly stop working.
6. Sometimes my screen stays on, forever, after asking to play music. (OnePlus 7T, Android 10). This does not always happen.
7. Google: "Here's your message, send it?"
Me: Yes
Google: Sits there for a moment and pops up the results for "Yes" in the assistant.
My biggest gripe isn't what it can and can not do. It is the inconsistency that drives me up the wall. I am not a heavy user and most of my requests are because I wish for it to be hands-free in a car with bluetooth audio. I'm sure that this is a harder problem to solve than just me interacting with the phone, but it is a common use case.
I don't even bother trying to use any sort of voice commands while in a car unless I'm stopped and the radio is off. Road noise makes voice recognition an impossible task.
> 5. Commands which have worked for months suddenly stop working.
This is my biggest gripe. Whatever magic voodoo ML they use is inconsistent, and it's not clear what level of abstraction this inconsistency is happening in.
What I want is the reliability of Google Assistant's speech to text parsing, combined with a firm, customizable interface. Something like If This Then That, where there are some default commands with a clear reliable command pattern: "send message to George Orwell, we live in your book", and commands can be added.
Either that or you are part of some random A/B test which made some change to the command. I've always wondered how much A/B testing contributes to the inconsistencies in Google Assistant, and other things like Chrome or Netflix
I'm sure when I had an iPhone 5 I had reliable skipping tracks and sending text messages via Siri when driving.
I use Android these days, but have stopped even attempting to use voice control when driving for all the reasons you've mentioned. It does almost feel like the functionality has gone backwards in recent years.
5 seconds after sleep, except when kept unlocked by Smart Lock. For Smart Lock, I have "On Body Detection" as well as a trusted Bluetooth device enabled.
Part of the disconnect here is likely how I am understanding "Trusted Bluetooth Device". I likely have to unlock it once while paired with that BT device, while the text says "$DEVICE_NAME unlocks this device when nearby".
Think of the assistants as young children. As a reference, someone I know spent some time in Miami with his wife and 2 young kids. After some time, the young son told his dad that he wanted to go back to "yourhammy". The dad eventually decoded "yourhammy" was the kid's interpretation of Miami as My-hammy. Your Likes => My Likes reminded me of that story.
I think children are probably at least as smart as adults, but are missing assumed context on almost everything. Maybe the same is the real problem with smart assistance?
This is what I was thinking. If you stop a second to think about it from their perspective, it can make more sense. (I know in 2020 it is unheard of to think about something from a different point of view than one's own.) Even real-life human beings in the assistant role get things wrong as they interpret the original request not as intended.
I believe current evidence is that children grow both intelligence and knowledge into adolescence. After that, it's mostly knowledge. i.e. both compute and data grows for quite some duration, then it's mostly data.
In that case maybe the assistants should be more like children and like ask questions?
Relatedly, I wonder if these assistants “filter bubble” you like search does. Like, learning what types of things you are looking for and grouping you with other similar people.
Regressions in language understanding are common when children are acquiring deeper understanding of the rules of that language. For example a kid may start saying 'letted' for the past-tense of 'let', even if they had used it correctly before.
That is a great story. Honestly, I do intend to treat smart assistants that way. I can accept that they're imperfect and that they're tools that only work in certain ways. I can figure out a way to either make them be useful to me or abandon them if the way is too hard. I'm not asking for perfection.
The thing is predictability, though, and maybe handling the common use cases. It gets frustrating when they get worse. Kids, on the other hand, only get better at understanding you (though perhaps also better at frustrating you on purpose).
To put it simply, I'm happy to make myself perform incantations. I'll say "Ok Google, grooblepuff the bonkman" to get the thing to do the thing. This whole thing has made me understand why wizards and sorcerers chant Accio! and Sectumsempra! and shit like that because if they just said "Bring me my firebolt" no one knows how the AI that runs magic in the world would interpret that.
And you know someone who feels this strongly about the product is pretty bought into it. Like, if I didn't use it so much, I wouldn't be complaining this much.
Haha, I've lived a life that ranges from lacking toilets to living for free in beautiful apartments owned by movie stars. Trust me, I know my life is great.
But the way I see it is that any Google Assistant PM is going to see this for what it is: someone who is angry because they love not because they hate.
The assistant has gotten markedly worse at finding music since the home devices came out a few years ago. Songs I used to be able to find by describing vaguely it can now no longer find at all, and it gives me random indie artists for songs I actually know the title og unless I literally spell it out (and even then, it often fails). Woe be to you whose desired song only exists as a Youtube (but not Youtube Music) video. Something behind the scenes has changed, and it's just another reason never to trust Google to maintain their services.
Reminds me of this voice command skecth I've watched recently (careful, loud): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n-GAd33jew
Especially, since the problem wasn't the voice command in your case.
Come back home from work, I frequently say "Ok Google, text Mary 'home in 10'", only to be told that it can't do that because it doesn't have a "Home" number for "Mary."
I have to re-do it with "Ok Google, text Mary 'I'll be home in 10'", and growl a lot on the inside.
the google assistant is getting objectively worse and stupider. It worked better a couple years ago. The thing I hate the most about these opaque, closed box systems is the absolute dependence I have on them. I can't just freeze the version of software I'm running that is working. Nearly every app I have that works great, will at some point stop working and regress. Almost universally that is true. I despise the new era we're in where the user has zero control over what is running on their hardware.
Given how they killed off Google Play Music and foisted YouTube Music on us, I have to conclude that Google hates music and wants to do everything they can to ruin the listening experience. It's as if no one involved in product design has even a passing interest in music.
When cancelling my YouTube Premium subscription one of the exit survey questions for "reason for cancellation" was "Unhappy with the YouTube Music App." So clearly there's some awareness of the unpopularity of YTM out there. However while it specifically asked about the app, whereas the real problem is the whole YTM service/experience on all platforms -- in particular the web app. Hopefully the cancellations and the survey results percolate to the right people.
I'm still surprised these things have become so ubiquitous. I remember thinking "these things will never catch on", but they caught on massively in spite of their flaws. I guess the ability to do an action without requiring hands is such a powerful draw that it outweighs all the pain that comes with it.
Realisticly, how many of the people working on Google Voice, Siri and Alexa do you think try to use their own service as much as possible day to day? Because just like you, I think it's evident they simply don't. They build for others, not for themselves, and they miss the point 50% of the time.
What we need are people building interfaces for themselves, not people building interface they think are good for others.
Conversely, I've been pleasantly surprised at how well voice recognition works with weird song/album titles nowadays. "Hey Siri, play 'Zombie by the Cranberries by Andrew Jackson Jihad' by AJJ on Spotify" works exactly as intended.
About 16 years ago, I worked in the IBM Solutions Experience Lab (with the smart kitchen and living room and stuff). One thing I did was to set up the "smart car" simulator, which connected with IBM's cloud stuff at the time, including their voice recognition. I'm testing this diddly-bob and say, "Turn on headlights." The simulacar honks its horn. Loudly.
Unfortunately, there was a tour going through the lab at the time. Some VPs from some company got to watch me honk the horn and then bang my head against the desk.
In the last 16 years, the state of the art has not advanced, as far as recognizing my speech goes. It still don't work.
It's taken me 10+ attempts to get Google Home to wake me up to a radio station on weekday mornings. Even with the alarm supposedly set, it works maybe 30% of the time, so I end up setting alarms elsewhere too.
I'm astonished at how badly it works compared to Alexa, but sadly, Alexa no longer supports alarms via BBC Sounds, so it's not an option for me.
It's probably obvious that the only way these services would get improved is if they actually made money. Alexa is constantly being improved since it's a vector for revenue. Siri and Google Home and Cortana are tinker toys for engineering and R&D.
When Bart, Lisa , Maggie and Marge were at the Mt. Useful Visitors Center, Bart went to a statue of Smokey the Bear. Smokey said "Only WHO can prevent forest fires ?" Bart then pressed the You button and Smokey said "You pressed you, referring to me, that is incorrect. The correct answer is you."
This used to really irritate me. Microsoft called folders things like “my pictures”. The awkward personalisation seemed so gross (I used a Mac). However Spotify’s “Your likes” is even worse, it sounds more like big brother giving me temporary access. I’m not sure how I ended up fixating on this.
"AI" (quoting since we aren't there yet) will have to deal with what Melanie Mitchell calls "the long tail problem" before we'll accept it as AI - https://youtu.be/NMUqvhuDZtQ . While she gives instances such as "how is an autonomous vehicle supposed to distinguish between a flock of birds on the road versus a small snowman versus a kid versus a rock versus a small animal.. all of which would warrant different responses, if the system can only respond if it has seen this stuff in training before." (paraphrasing) .. and she brings up the example of Teslas getting confused by salt lines laid prior to snow season. (I'm in India, so I wouldn't know such things were done either.)
With natural language and speech interfaces, we face such long tail problems too .. like the Burger King ad triggering a whopper lookup via "ok google".[1]
Vaguely reminiscent of when Marco V released a track called "C:\ del *.mp3"[0] out of frustration towards mp3 rips. Still amusing to me that he didn't quite get the command right.
The other day a song called S01E02.Return.Of.The.Arsonist.720p.HDTV.x264 by Blood Command appeared in my Spotify Discover Weekly. I thought someone messed up, but no...that's the name of song!
Instead of "C:\ del .mp3", it should be "del C:\ .mp3".
Edit: lol, I didn't know that we could format text with asterisks on HN. There should be an asterisk before each ".mp3", but as you can see, if I put them in it just italicizes the text in between them.
Cheers to you and sp332 below, it's appreciated. There's a certain irony in me chuckling over the incorrect code in the track title and then being unable to format my own text minutes later, haha.
I've worked on large music platforms and this kind of spam is always an ongoing battle. You'll see artists pop up with the same name as a popular song, songs named 'play [genre]', and all sorts of things.
Spotify's mobile app is honestly one of the worst f'in apps I have ever used. I have a family plan and both my wife and I have the same issues.
First, Spotify has no idea how to pipe its playlists to Alexa and Google ... so you can't ever seem to get either to play playlists.
Second, Spotify randomly decides sometimes that it won't connect to the Internet, even when your phone has a 4G connection and everything else works fine. To compound the issue, Spotify doesn't know how to show you your offline downloads when you are in Android Auto mode ... so you basically can't even play your songs when on a drive.
I need to figure out how to export my playlists and then I'm off Spotify forever. Worse customer experience ever.
The funny thing is that this bit doesn't even work because you would have to say "Ok Google play Ok Google Play Music". The bit would be much more effective if the album was just named "Music" and the tracks various genres. However then the fact that the name is a bit isn't even noticeable. There is a weird balancing act between the effectiveness of art and making it clear that what you are doing is art at all. This artist choice the latter.
> The funny thing is that this bit doesn't even work because you would have to say "Ok Google play Ok Google Play Music"
the next step for it to go really viral would be to make the album consist only of various generic voices saying "ok google play ok google play music".
I took that to be the point; that in addition to all the title permutations, the user may have to prepend the command of whatever service they're using.
This creates even more combinations and even more shenanigans.
What if you said, "Alexa play Ok Google Play Music"? Might be a scenario when both your Alexa and Google devices (e.g. android phones, etc) would start play music unintentionally.
I first noticed this type of thing happening when "Ok Google, play Release Radar" started playing a "Releaseradar" album/single vs. my Spotify Release Radar playlist as it used to. Simply infuriating.
I had an amazing indie music discovery service in Google Play Music. I found so many fantastic underplayed artists, and it helped me explore all the small music venues in my city. I've got a wall full of signed albums from artists I discovered with Google Play Music.
YouTube music recommends Britney Spears. It's so awfully wrong about my tastes.
It also randomly inserts YouTube parody videos into my playlist. Why the hell would I want to listen to stuff like this
https://youtu.be/-5jWtz3rzco ?
I hate Google so much now. They're like evil 90's Microsoft, but incompetent. They've got their ad monopoly / web destruction engine to sustain them, but they're Dilbert Pointy Haired Boss bad with everything else.
No gamers will be surprised when Stadia gets canned.
It'll be hilarious when they decide to shutter GCP. Remember when it leaked that they were internally threatening to defund it if they couldn't hit growth targets? Imagine all their B2B relationships getting hit as hard as their consumers do.
> YouTube music recommends Britney Spears. It's so awfully wrong about my tastes.
Just dislike these songs/videos. At first all I did was play playlists I already had in YT since the 'my mix' (now "my supermix") playlist had random songs I listened to 5 years ago, but after about a week of using the 'my mix' and disliking songs, I started getting a bunch of great songs from artists that I otherwise had no idea about.
The problem is, OP already did this. So did I. How much in-fighting is there at google that they couldn't just port over the data?
Right now I'm pissed that Google tv doesn't have a working account switcher. If my wife watches music videos it retrains my YouTube music.
Also, youtube music sucks when it comes to spotty connections and file management. I have fiber at work and home, unmetered 4g, and 100gig free space on my phone. Why doesn't it just download everything? I loose service for hours on end and I come to find that it has either not saved any songs or it has deleted everything it can. Today I started an album and then hit a dead spot, and it had deleted all the songs before the track I was on, and not qeued up the rest of the album. Google music had a setting where you could tell it to allocate gigs of space and keep it full. This push to simplify user experiences is why I avoid apple, and I hate seeing it creep into google.
Could not agree more. Even little stuff like my son who is on my family plan. He used Google Play Music all the time with no problems. When they forced us to move to YT Music, now it won't let him get the app because he's too young and YT isn't allowed. So I either have to give up all the parental controls that I need and use, or he can't access the family plan music subscription that I pay for and used to have with no problems at all, because I was forcefully migrated to a new service I didn't want when the old one was perfectly fine. I despise the new world we are in.
I'm about to go full self-hosted on a ton of stuff. Plex, Book Sonic, Next Cloud, etc. Then I can move when I want to move.
Edit: I actually bought a used (came from Google I believe) Dell R620 on ebay, loaded to the hilt (dual 8 core (16 total physical cores) E5-2650, 256 GB RAM, 10 600GB drives (SAS)). They're amazingly affordable. I paid around $750 with shipping. I can run a hell of a lot of stuff on that and since I'm mostly at home these days it will be blazing fast (way better than existing cloud stuff that is limited by my 20Mbps downlink, which is the fastest I can get). Nothing like a Gigabit connection to my "cloud" :-D
Unfortunately the problem with self-hosting these things is actually obtaining the content (mainly regarding movies since iTunes song purchases haven't been DRM protected for a long time). Getting the right set-up for removing DRM from your uhd/hd blu-rays is hard since hardware is constantly being updated (you might have to purchase second-hand blu-ray readers), and downloading them is technically illegal even if you have the physical media - not that the FBI is going to indict you for having a personal media library. I imagine books have the same issues if you're trying to get unencrypted digital versions of them.
I try to buy all my audio books from Downpour since they are DRM free, and music as you mentioned isn't a problem. I was very into music in the 90s/00s and bought nearly every CD I wanted and I ripped them into mp3s years ago. I may just budget a $100 or so to buy mp3s I don't have that I still want to listen to, and cancel YT music.
I don't often buy ebooks since I love physical paper, but when I do I try to buy DRM free or use Calibre/Apprentice Alf to strip the DRM and convert to epub.
Movies are a real challenge though. Plenty of older stuff I have on DVD and it's easy to rip, but it does take an enormous amount of effort to rip blu-ray. I may try to do an OTA antenna hooked into Plex for most of TV, but will probably keep CBS all access and a couple others for movies/shows/etc. So I'll self host most things :-D
I definitely get some nice new music on my supermix.
I also get songs I've already thumbs downed reappearing repeatedly. It's bizarre how bad it is in some respects, while still being decent in others. (They're not even new top hits being aggressively promoted. It's mostly 80s rock they'll toss in no matter how many times I say I "no, I don't like this song".)
Not gonna lie. I'm very disappointed I can't sync my Stadia controller to my PC via bluetooth. Google gave out Stadia pros, but it's such a horrible idea ( instead of Xbox Game pass stadia forces you to buy additional games).
Google provides a gateway to the internet for most of us. They control what we find in most cases , but it's almost as if they have tons of money to spend elsewhere but lack any direction on how to do so.
Thanks! I built it several years ago and never really promoted it as it seemed to me like the ability to play on your phone was crucial, but not really possible to do with YouTube videos on iOS. Ahh well.
The apps do, but the website does not. music.google.com used to have native support, but to cast music.youtube.com you have to cast the tab, which is far less than perfect. (Instead of streaming directly from the CDN to the chromecast, casting a tab will stream from your desktop to the chromecast. It works so poorly that sometimes even the pitch changes slightly, like an old timey recording.)
Dude just stop giving Google the benefit of the doubt and switch to Spotify. Google has proven time and time again that their priorities lie within their advertising and their search engine - Everything else is a monetized side project.
I've tried Spotify, its great but their inability to upload your own music is a gamebreaker for me, since I listen to a decent amount of indie and obscure bands and songs
Just tried it. My experience might be abnormal, but it seems glitchy and slow. A playlist that I already created with my offline songs synced with my phone, but playlist said 0 songs. No error messages, very unintuitive. Had to create a new playlist and add the songs again, still wasn't showing. Relaunched spotify on both devices two times and it finally showed up. And this is for ~20 songs. I wouldn't want to use this method on a big library.
Also, Spotify doesn't upload your music for streaming, its just a sync between your phone and computer that have to be on the same wifi, and keeps the songs downloaded on your phone. Wouldn't work for a collection bigger than your phones storage. I wouldn't even compare this to GPM.
You can add custom music in the Spotify desktop client, and if you have a mobile device on the same network, it'll automatically upload it to that device as well. Not cloud based though.
Years later I'm still bitter about them buying and killing Songza, it was one of my favorite recommendation algorithms to date, probably second only to "The Upload" auto playlist on SoundCloud.
Viewed differently: it is ultimately a good thing that Youtube Music is bad, because otherwise, that would be another thing dominated by Google.
It's like people lamenting how sad it is that Windows mobile failed. Well, why would you want Microsoft to dominate both desktop and mobile market? Seems like a scary scenario.
In this perspective, I can appreciate how clueless Google can be sometimes. It's not a bug, it's a feature! ;)
Yeah, but I would like to have a good music product. I'm currently between options because nothing works for me. I was a happy Google Play Music subscriber for years. All they had to to was change the colour scheme and swap the backend and I would have been a happy camper. Now I have canceled my subscription and don't know what to use.
At the end of the day music isn't critical to me, so I don't really care if Google dominates it. If I had to switch I'm not too worried about being locked into something.
I tried it for three months. It pauses randomly in my browser and Google Home. The "radio" feature repeats songs like crazy, the queuing is super confusing and inconsistent (it depends on the "type" of playlist you are listening to IIUC) and it consistently recommended me the same songs.
It had some nice features too, but I decided to quit. Now I'm just listening to my collection of mp3s but not super happy.
Had similar experiences. A funny bug was when I pressed the next button too fast for some reason my playlist was switched out with most popular (I guess). It was only Britney Spears and Justin Bieber.
Totally agree on the playlists too. I recently liked a video on youtube where a dude put guitar strings in his piano and for some reason yt music put that in my liked music playlist. It doesn't even contain actual music, just explanations of what he's doing
> YouTube music recommends Britney Spears. It's so awfully wrong about my tastes.
Despite the fact that your Google Play Music "like" data is migrated into YT music, it doesn't seem to properly incorporate it in the algorithmically generated playlists.
What I've found is that I basically need to treat YT music as a clean slate, and specifically start playing and re-liking things (i.e., I'd re-play my favorite albums, thumb-down and thumb-up again the songs in them).
Now that I've done this, it's doing well enough - in some ways better than GPM was (multiple "mixes" presented as options with different clusters of artists in the summaries).
I can't say whether re-thumbing was what did the trick, or simply re-listening, though. And it's incredibly stupid that I should have to do this to make it work correctly.
Some years ago I went to do something by voice and wanted to cancel "Ok Google ... nevermind" and then it played Nevermind by Nirvana. Thought that was goofy, I didn't ask to play music or anything.
Remember back when Apple was running ads for Chance the Rapper's debut album (Apple Music exclusive) "Coloring Book?" Apple was also pushing a lot into Siri. I can't recall the specifics, but I thought the ad had Chance saying "hey siri play coloring book."
So, I asked Siri the above prompt. Siri took me to Apple Music and played an album with the name "Coloring Book" but by a different artist.
My wife used to always says "Hey Google Play Smooth Jazz" when we got a google home, so since it was hooked up to my spotify, I made a new playlist called "Smooth Jazz" that simply contained "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley.
I don't think they did. Rick Rolling is fairly common- the commenter you replied to suggested "Careless Whisper" in addition to the Rick Roll because it would be a careless whisper that would cause the Rick Roll to play. They were adding a layer to the original joke. At least, that's what it seemed like to me.
Every time this topic comes up on here the comments are full of complaints about 1) privacy and 2) broken ux. I have to ask why do you even bother? I’ve never once thought I wish I didn’t have to pick up my phone got 5 seconds to do something simple.
It's incredibly handy when cooking. "Hey Google set up a 15 minutes timer", "Hey Google how many teaspoons is in a cup?", etc while you have your hands dirty / busy.
no doubt its useful for that but is it really worth it considering the price? arent most assistants powered by batteries so it also has an ongoing cost, especially if you have multiple devices? all that just to add a timer 3-5 seconds quicker?
and then there's still other issues like privacy or the thing being an expensive paperweight if you're Internet isn't working
For a while, I had a Spotify playlist called "My Playlist called My Playlist" so I could say "Hey Google, play my playlist called 'My Playlist called My Playlist'"
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadI don't imagine it's likely to have the effect of confusing anyone's smart speaker, is it?
I had to say “Ok Google play okay Google play music”
Damn, that's kinda lame. I was hoping it was tracks of phrases starting "OK Google" to make your Google Home flip out and do weird shit.
Wasted opportunity.
Ingenious if it actually works.
Previously, I could say "Play my Thumbs Up" and it could do so on Google Play Music.
It keeps playing a song called "My Likes". Jesus fucking Christ, Google. If I say "Play my My Likes playlist" something random happens.
Do these guys even use their product? I'm just glad this album didn't come out before the forced migration.
EDIT: Okay, I went to verify it and this has to be the best instance of massive PEBKAC plus some UX donkeyness. The auto playlist is called "Your Likes" so I can get the Assistant to do the right thing by telling her to play her likes (Ok Google, play your likes). What the fuck man. But fine. At least I got it working.
I've suffered with this for months and now I find a solution in the few minutes after posting this.
Even Gmail, can’t trust that it won’t be deprecated in the future.
Leaving YouTube is nigh impossible.
any examples?
Music-wise, I have completely transitioned to Alexa and Amazon Music. The interface is worse, but they seem to be more stable.
I just wish I could upload my own music and have Alexa connect to Bandcamp.
In classic Internet tradition, you basically need to setup a shadow Google account where you lie about their age and add them to your family account anyway. Thanks Google!
The "solution" is to cast the tab. Which means lower bitrate, no music controls, and if you cast to a display device, the whole tab screencasts etc.
I guess it's because nobody important uses the web anymore? Or something?
(Disclaimer: I work at Google. But not on YTM. Most Googlers I know have switched to Spotify, including myself.)
Ask for War Pigs? Here’s the live version
Ask for a Come Sail Away? Here’s a terrible cover
Ask for Magic Stick? Here’s an instrumental
I swear it just picks the version of the song that pays the least royalties and plays that instead of the right one...
This is a very interesting theory, I don't know if this was revealed somehow but considering how consistently terrible the guesses are on assistant devices... I wouldn't be surprised.
I think the far more likely explanation is just that these home assistant products suck.
Assuming the voice recognition part worked perfectly:
1) query song database for input 2) play result that is most popular (most plays by manual selection in eg desktop client etc)
The only tricky part is to determine whether the query is an artist or a title but again in most cases this will be solved by checking popularity.
What's a plausible explanation that they mess this up so badly?
I am sure they're working on improving it. We've not yet reached late stage capitalism with voice assistants.
Karaoke time! You can do this.
The answer to any technical problem will present itself within 30 seconds (sometimes minutes) of asking "Hey, can you take a look at this?"
Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
The concept is named after Ward Cunningham, father of the wiki. According to Steven McGeady, the law's author, Wikipedia may be the most well-known demonstration of this law.
Cunningham's Law can be considered the Internet equivalent of the French saying "prêcher le faux pour savoir le vrai" (preach the falsehood to know the truth). Sherlock Holmes has been known to use the principle at times (for example, in The Sign of the Four.)
Or put differently, you are completely wrong about Sherlock using it in Sign of the Four. Prove me wrong! ;)
"If, instead, you say 'Linux sucks, you can't even get a f*&$ing WiFi driver working!' thousands of people will solve the problem for you."
Whether unintentional or not, it has put a huge smile on my face.
If you say "OK Google play my likes on youtube music" it will play `Your likes`.
If you forget the `on youtube music` part even if your default player is set to Youtube music it will play the `my likes` song.
And on mobile GPM had a very simple functionality: a playlist containing all the songs you've downloaded offline. To the best of my knowledge YTM has no such thing, just a playlist _it makes for you_ of offline songs.
Also, the shuffle button only shuffles the current songs in queue, not the playlist your currently listening too like Spotify and GP Music do.
They couldn't move it to my main because it was legacy, but that was where I had youtube premium/red whatever. So then I needed to switch between accounts. Not fun while you are driving.
Oh then they stopped premium so I started hearing ads. Not what I want when I'm trying to calm my screaming kid in the car. Oh, and I need to keep my phone screen on.
Many of the songs aren't the same as on Google play.
Google seems to be moving toward search/email/YouTube. With few other products. Probably good, they can't handle it.
Inferior is much better than "we'll delete your music library on an undisclosed date in December".
Maybe not Apple because their fanatics will apologize for any wrong doing.
When they forced the transition to YouTube music, I gave up the service for good.
Meanwhile, here in Siri Land...
Me: Hey, Siri, add "tomatoes" to my Groceries list.
Siri: OK, Reapreducer. Which list should I add it to?
Me: Groceries.
Siri: OK, Reapreducer. Which list should I add it to?
Me: Groceries.
Siri: OK, Reapreducer. Which list should I add it to?
Me: Groceries.
Siri: OK, Reapreducer. Which list should I add it to?
Me: Groceries.
Siri: OK, Reapreducer. Which list should I add it to?
Me: Cancel.
I've gone back to paper grocery lists. They Just Work™.
I see that I still have no reason to bother, it's going to frustrate me more than anything else (especially with how downhill voiceover has gone in 12).
The latter point is a bit broader: now that Siri can hit an arbitrary URL via shortcuts, you can really just set your own trigger phrase to do anything that can be automated. You better believe I have a raspberry pi on order which will be running a local webserver...
Point is, YMMV; just try it for yourself.
I take a photo with my phone. It's not perfect because to mark things off you'd have to use the photo-editing on the phone which would be rather clunky for that purpose. But it works if you don't mind checking things off in your head.
> How do you keep it from getting erased?
I've got a glass whiteboard and use liquid chalk markers. It's tough to accidentally erase something with those.
> Hey Siri, set a timer for 8 minutes.
> Ok. 8 minutes and counting.
I can't speak for the chef, but it does on HomePod. Each gets its own name and that name is announced when the alarm goes off.
"bleep bloop bleepity boop! Eggs timer. bleep bloop bleepity boop!
I only figured out through trial and error that I can name my Alexa timers without waiting for it to prompt me:
It has for at least the past couple years now.
Hey Siri, set a timer for 5 minutes. "OK."
Hey Siri, set another timer for 10 minutes. "A timer is already running, do you want to replace it?"
If you miss hearing the distinction in the confirmation, you'll miss the scheduled event
Edit: They also have distinct classification of alarm/timers. You can use either word to create one but checking what you've set or trying to cancel will result in 'no timers/alarms' set if your request doesn't match their system design.
> Hey Siri, set a timer for 13 minutes
> 30 minutes and counting.
> Hey Siri, set a timer for thirteen minutes.
> oh you already have a timer running, do you want me to change it?
> yes
Also I have set timers and lock the phone ‘too early’ and the timer was lost
I do have to specify "Living Room TV", even though the speaker and chromecast are configured to be in the same room, it still just turns off a bedroom tv if I'm not specific about which tv.
Also "Hey Google, turn off the Xbox" works, because I linked that at some point.
So not just timers! ;)
The thing I use Siri most for is "Hey, Siri. Tell me a joke."
My dream job is to work at Apple compiling jokes for Siri to belch out on demand.
It used to do a cheesy "Starting your timer.... Now", which would have been okay if a bit tedious repeatedly, apart from the fact that actually you could see that the timer started immediately, so the whole delayed "now" thing was completely misleading. It was like that for well over a year until I noticed it was fixed just recently.
Also Siri is constantly having problems knowing if I’m talking to my watch or my iPhone, even if my phone is in my pocket.
Perhaps it was just being passive-aggressive?
Funnily enough, this is one issue I don’t have: between my phone, watch and iPad I’m consistently impressed at how well it manages to choose the best one - does anyone know if Apple devices actively co-ordinate which one responds to Siri commands?
I say, “Add blood pressure <pause> 120 over 80 plus 60.” Then I use the shortcut to parse the string on the / and +, and record it to Health.
The hard part was finding delimiters that Siri would consistently record as a single character. That and realizing I needed a manual review step to make sure Siri didn’t happily pump garbage into my logs.
I don't use any of these "assistants", but curious if you responded with "Groceries List"? Knowing they work on keywords, to Siri, you may not be actually answering her question.
That said Siri feels at least 100 times smarter than Google assistant to me, the below are actual (if somewhat anonymized) examples:
- Google suggestions when I look at the phone at 5am in the morning: "text random friend of a friend that I answered a question for over Telegram" or "call customers project manager". See https://erik.itland.no/tag:aifails for screenshots and more examples. In the years I had access to the future it maybe helped me twice by pointing out it was time to leave for an appointment.
- Siri suggestions are mostly mundane (more or less predictably tells me when to leave for appointments, kids soccer and hockey training etc, suggests picking up kids at kindergarden - although not consistently, suggests sending messages to my wife over our preferred messaging solution, tweeting, or if I drive 5 minutes down to the shopping center: that I should drive home the way I always do etc) but I have never caught it suggesting outright idiotic things like Google, and once this weekend it even suggested something semi-smart (a text message to my wife that was surprisingly close to one I could have written myself to tell her I was on my way home, including one of my rather unusual abbreviations and with good timing :-)
TomTom had this solved eons ago - my TomTom 5000 from 2014 automatically sets destination as work when I get in the car in the morning, and home when I'm done with work. And it learns my schedule per day, so it doesn't do that on the weekends, or if I need to pop out somewhere at lunch. Such a simple feature from 6 years ago works better than anything that Google can seemingly come up with.
Almost 30 years later, how many orders of magnitude faster silicon and countless person-hours of research and I can't get my damn phone (which, yes, _is_ a marvel that way-back-when-me wouldn't believe) to recognize, "call mrs_mynameisash" when I'm using my hands-free while driving. I don't know how many times Google's voice assistant has called some (possibly local?) T-Mobile instead. And my wife's name sounds nothing like "T-Mobile".
I remember, when I was a wee little lad back in '96, playing on an old Mac Plus with a black and white screen. Even then we had software installed that would let us control the old Mac Plus with our voice. It was the first time I'd ever used a boom microphone.
Here, go reminisce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlainTalk
My dad insisted that a boom microphone was required -- not just any microphone but a "boom" microphone specifically. It was interesting when I showed him some smaller microphones years later that worked better with less noise.
Oh man have I grown since. Hardware and processing power have both grown so much. But speech recognition is still as dumb (or even dumber) as it was 30 years ago. It certainly didn't need the internet to work back then!
„Thank you... delete thank you“
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzJ0CytAsec
Also fun - you say something, the words you said show up on the screen, and then change into completely different words.
Yep. When it works, I get entries for both "ginger" and "ale."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25280410
Me: Ok, Google. Remind me to leave at 1 O'Clock.
Google: Ok. Do you want to save this? <shows preview of reminder, dings to indicate it's listening>
Me: Yes.
Google: Shows Google search results for "yes" and tosses the reminder.
Voice Recognition Elevator - ELEVEN!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNuFcIRlwdc
First aired in 2009
https://github.com/fredley/digital-black
Siri: I couldn’t find a shopping list, do you want me to create one?
Me: no. Hey Siri, add tomatoes and grap-
Siri: you have to select which app you want to continue <shows 6 apps, including Paprika. I tap Paprika> Sorry, Paprika has not implemented this function yet.
Me: Hey Siri, addtomatoesandgrapestotheshoppinglistinPaprika
Siri: ok, I’ve added “tomatoesandgrapes” to the shopping list in Paprika 3
<phone flies out of the window>
It's always frustrating but never particularly hard to find the special incantation that will invoke it to do the thing that you want it to. Overall though it's simply not worth the effort which is probably why I end up using these overwhelmingly complex devices only for their most mundane functions like timers and getting the weather.
Trying for anything moderately complex, and I might as well be asking the dog to do it for me.
For example I have Philips Hue lights behind the TV/Screen on my living room wall, and I use their "color loop" behind the screen when watching movies etc. The problem is that "TV", "Television" and "Screen" are semi-protected words, so "turn off tv lights" ends up with the TV being turned off 9/10 times. "We" compromised and those lights are now called "screen wall" lights
As for setting certain lights to "the color loop", what used to be a 90% success rate (the other 10% turning my lights to "the color blue/bloo(p)") will now set the lights of the room I'm currently in to the color loop, which is usually the living room, not the screen wall. Also as recently as this summer I used to be able to set the whole house to "the color loop" this feature recently disappeared. The color loop slowly and nearly imperceptibly fades the colors from red to green to blue etc over several minutes. It's technically part of "hue labs" but it's a "beta feature" that's been available in the product now for over three years so I would argue it is core functionality at this point.
At least there are no tribbles.
Because coffee is for closers.
But I already have a grocery list and a process for it. I just want a reminder to add something to it.
"Hey Siri, set a reminder <for {date/time|location}>."
> "Okay, what do you want me to remind you?"
"Put dingus on the grocery list"
> Done.
I used to be able to ask Siri: "Hey Siri, please set the lights to green." Then she would obediently set all of the lights to green. Nice, that's my favorite!
Then a few months ago some update was pushed (iOS? Apple Home app? Philips Hue app? Philips Hue Basestation OS? No idea) and now that exact phrase (which has worked for two years) suddenly elicits a response: "OK, which room?" -- followed by a listing of the rooms in which I have devices and a catch-all "Everywhere".
So now I've had to change my incantation: "Hey Siri, please set all of my lights to green."
I'm just waiting for her to start asking "Do you want Lime Green, Aqua Green, or Vomit Green?". Or worse, maybe she'll just give up and say "OK, here's a list of Google results for Green Lights." Maybe even throw a captcha in there asking me to select the green lights at intersections, just for good measure.
/s
Actually, I set my living room to red because that's my favorite. And I set my dining room to blue because eating is cool. And when you gotta go then just look for the green light in the hallway in front of the bathroom. And my office is definitely purple in the morning to show just how much I want to punch things because I have to work. It's pink in the afternoon because pink noise from the freeway shouldn't be limited to sounds.
At night I set all the lights to 15%. With the colors it's dark enough to not be blinded when I want some water from the kitchen but also bright enough to see the contours of the door knob or kitchen table or dining chair so I don't stab myself with any of the corners while walking blind.
What colors do you set your lights to?
I have some colored lights from Eria that have about as good color spectrum and integrate with Zigbee base stations. They were about 1/2 the price of Philips Hue. But the downside is that they don't integrate with Apple Home. Apple Home (and Siri) only recognizes the expensive Philips Hue lights even though the Eria ones are connected to the same Philips Hue base station. So with the Eria lights I just change the colors manually with a third party app on my phone.
And as a bonus as a developer: Philips Hue has an API to work with the devices connected to the base station. It's super fun to tell coworkers about a script that sets my lights in the office (and visible in video meetings) to red because the server in the living room is having trouble. ;)
For more generic lighting, there's a reverse engineered firmware you can load onto a ZigBee. I used them to create some wake-up therapy lights: http://edwardsh.in/2019/07/22/hue-compatible-therapy-lights
> [...] this device will be free from defects in material and workmanship and will operate for 2 years and 3 years for Energy Star certified products, unless a different period is stated in or on the packaging of the product, based on up to 3 hours average working time per day/7 days per week, when used as directed
I don't really know anyone who only uses lights three hours a day, especially when it gets dark pretty early during winter.
[0] https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us/support/legal/warranty
For working during the day, my office lamp is "banana mania". For dinner time, the dining room lights are "topaz".
You can also set a light to a color manually, then ask Siri what color it is. (This is how I discovered "banana mania" which is Siri's name for the color Hue calls "concentrate".
Never even thought of this. That's modern day software discoverability for you
I have an iPad with iOS12, and when I say “turn off the lights”, all the lights turn off.
I also have an iPhone with iOS14, and when I say “turn off the lights”, she asks where. Super annoying.
“Hey google, dinner time “ - shut all lights but the kitchen and start a playlist.
“Hey google, tv time” - set all lights to specific colours and turn off any music.
not always. I used to use google play music to play music from my own library in the car. any time I asked it to play a moderately obscure artist, it would interpret that as whatever popular artist had a similar name. it would then play the radio station for that artist, since I didn't have the premium subscription. I found some success with spelling out the artist name letter by letter, but even that consistently failed for certain names.
also sometimes I would say "list albums by X" to help me remember the name of what I wanted. no matter what I tried, it would only list three albums "and others". who could want this behavior? if I ask you to list albums, yes I actually want to hear every single album name!
I'm now paying for YT music (since the free version apparently does not support android auto), and it so far it works flawlessly. infuriating.
If these things would actually work, I'd definitely use one regularily. However, whenever I visit an Alexa owner, I realize after a few interactions that I really couldn't be bothered with this stuff.
I think the "taxi" problem is still around with Siri. Put any taxi organisation into your phonebook, and include "taxi" in the name. You will likely not be able to call it with siri, since it insists to search for taxis in your area. Its always the same bug. These things have absolutely no idea about the context. And some hand-crafted rules go haywire after a while, because apparently nobody reviews them. When I got my first iPhone (iOS 5) I put in my date of birth during configuration, and promptly noticed that the german speech synthesizers says Nineteenseventynine when I enter 1979. All aother 4-digit numbers are fine, only 1979 is pronounced english. So apparently someone put this exception in there for a completely bogus reason, and it stayed there. It is still there today, after 8 years.
Because they’re currently better than nothing. My HomePod works 90% of the time. I can create specific scenes for the things she can’t quite figure out.
Being able to walk in to the kitchen and tell her to put the radio or the light or a specific album or a timer on is actually really amazing. Most of the time. Certainly amazing enough to suffer the times she doesn’t want to co-operate, because then I just do that myself which I would have done anyway.
It helps that the HomePod is also a great speaker in its own right, and that it’s one single cylinder with one cord. It’s a very tidy device.
The only use case I see which has an acceptable failure rate is asking for the time and setting a timer. And even asking for the time fails about 1/10 times with the Alexa system my gf has in her flat...
And if asking for the time is the only thing which works decently, well, that is really telling about the state of the art...
Why not?
Why not?!
Similar story for self-driving cars: car driving helpers/assistants (lane keeping, etc.) are ok, self-driving cars will be a huge disaster until we are really close to AGI.
These are the things where getting 80-90% there isn't enough. We're smarter than chimps or other animals because we can cover the long tail of events.
I think magical incantations is a perfect way to think about it. Using voice assistants feels more like the land of Harry Potter than the land of technology we live in. It's the flipside of “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
My tolerance for mistakes for simple commands that work sometimes / are the right command ... but don't work is ultra low.
Like how is it my Android phone will default to just googling "exact valid voice command letter for letter" (it's used in a commercial for cripes sake!) ... and not somehow notice that?
I start using it. I have two or three commands I do regularly.
One of the commands stops working. I stop using it forever.
I watch a lot of YouTube on my phone when cooking, I even built a cardboard stand for my phone for this reason. What I want is for YT to respond to these voice commands:
- Pause video.
- Play video.
- Rewind 10 seconds.
- Skip the (expletive) ad <-- ok, I can understand why this one might not work.
Sadly, this doesn't work. And it's the only voice assistance I really need :(
[1] https://github.com/kalliope-project/kalliope
Was also curious about your use cases on the phone (aside from ad skip), and they actually worked for me. I'm using a pixel 4, though wouldn't think that'd make a difference.
OK Google, install Newpipe.apk
Similarly, they say English language Search is powered by Transformers. But when I want to perform searches it often switches the intent to something wrong. It's a blunt tool, not a precision instrument.
1. I have my phone set up to trust bluetooth in my car and unlock my phone. I get in the car and say "okay google, open spotify" -- this is so that it will continue playing what I was listening to before I left work.
"Okay", she says, and then tells me that she can't do that because my screen is locked. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it does not.
2. When I had Google Play Music it reliably would play random sub-par covers of songs rather than the original, even when I specified the artist.
3. Sometimes it decides to rely on screen input instead of audio controls. I can't do that while I'm driving.
4. It sometimes ends voice input too early or does voice input inconsistently. I've sent messages to my wife saying "I'm on my way home exclamation point" instead of "I'm on my way home!"
5. Commands which have worked for months suddenly stop working.
6. Sometimes my screen stays on, forever, after asking to play music. (OnePlus 7T, Android 10). This does not always happen.
7. Google: "Here's your message, send it?" Me: Yes Google: Sits there for a moment and pops up the results for "Yes" in the assistant.
My biggest gripe isn't what it can and can not do. It is the inconsistency that drives me up the wall. I am not a heavy user and most of my requests are because I wish for it to be hands-free in a car with bluetooth audio. I'm sure that this is a harder problem to solve than just me interacting with the phone, but it is a common use case.
Or, possibly different tires.
This is an unusual problem - sounds annoying in general!
This is my biggest gripe. Whatever magic voodoo ML they use is inconsistent, and it's not clear what level of abstraction this inconsistency is happening in.
What I want is the reliability of Google Assistant's speech to text parsing, combined with a firm, customizable interface. Something like If This Then That, where there are some default commands with a clear reliable command pattern: "send message to George Orwell, we live in your book", and commands can be added.
I use Android these days, but have stopped even attempting to use voice control when driving for all the reasons you've mentioned. It does almost feel like the functionality has gone backwards in recent years.
Part of the disconnect here is likely how I am understanding "Trusted Bluetooth Device". I likely have to unlock it once while paired with that BT device, while the text says "$DEVICE_NAME unlocks this device when nearby".
This isn't great.
I get the impression that many Google employees do not use the products they work on.
Relatedly, I wonder if these assistants “filter bubble” you like search does. Like, learning what types of things you are looking for and grouping you with other similar people.
The thing is predictability, though, and maybe handling the common use cases. It gets frustrating when they get worse. Kids, on the other hand, only get better at understanding you (though perhaps also better at frustrating you on purpose).
To put it simply, I'm happy to make myself perform incantations. I'll say "Ok Google, grooblepuff the bonkman" to get the thing to do the thing. This whole thing has made me understand why wizards and sorcerers chant Accio! and Sectumsempra! and shit like that because if they just said "Bring me my firebolt" no one knows how the AI that runs magic in the world would interpret that.
And you know someone who feels this strongly about the product is pretty bought into it. Like, if I didn't use it so much, I wouldn't be complaining this much.
But the way I see it is that any Google Assistant PM is going to see this for what it is: someone who is angry because they love not because they hate.
This is a question that I too ask myself daily with a lot of the software that I deal with and depend on.
Now only Google can hear my every word via cellphone and Nest.
And look how incompetent Google is. I don't even get creepy suggestions on ads since I deleted facebook.
I have to re-do it with "Ok Google, text Mary 'I'll be home in 10'", and growl a lot on the inside.
Wonder if these AI assistants will lead to the development of a new language.
Exterminatum Horix Abracadabra (Siri, play something nice).
That said, I end up frustrated with Alexa more often than satisfied.
What we need are people building interfaces for themselves, not people building interface they think are good for others.
Unfortunately, there was a tour going through the lab at the time. Some VPs from some company got to watch me honk the horn and then bang my head against the desk.
In the last 16 years, the state of the art has not advanced, as far as recognizing my speech goes. It still don't work.
I'm astonished at how badly it works compared to Alexa, but sadly, Alexa no longer supports alarms via BBC Sounds, so it's not an option for me.
When Bart, Lisa , Maggie and Marge were at the Mt. Useful Visitors Center, Bart went to a statue of Smokey the Bear. Smokey said "Only WHO can prevent forest fires ?" Bart then pressed the You button and Smokey said "You pressed you, referring to me, that is incorrect. The correct answer is you."
This used to really irritate me. Microsoft called folders things like “my pictures”. The awkward personalisation seemed so gross (I used a Mac). However Spotify’s “Your likes” is even worse, it sounds more like big brother giving me temporary access. I’m not sure how I ended up fixating on this.
With natural language and speech interfaces, we face such long tail problems too .. like the Burger King ad triggering a whopper lookup via "ok google".[1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/business/burger-king-tv-a...
If your gonna do this at least bring real content
[0]https://www.discogs.com/MarcoV-Cdelmp3-Solarize/release/1334...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mr._Robot_episodes
Edit: lol, I didn't know that we could format text with asterisks on HN. There should be an asterisk before each ".mp3", but as you can see, if I put them in it just italicizes the text in between them.
First, Spotify has no idea how to pipe its playlists to Alexa and Google ... so you can't ever seem to get either to play playlists.
Second, Spotify randomly decides sometimes that it won't connect to the Internet, even when your phone has a 4G connection and everything else works fine. To compound the issue, Spotify doesn't know how to show you your offline downloads when you are in Android Auto mode ... so you basically can't even play your songs when on a drive.
I need to figure out how to export my playlists and then I'm off Spotify forever. Worse customer experience ever.
the next step for it to go really viral would be to make the album consist only of various generic voices saying "ok google play ok google play music".
https://youtube.com/watch?v=u_kQJiogKCE
It's South Park, so the nsfw should be implied.
Minutes into the episode Twitter was full of people posting about how it was messing with everyone's smart speakers. Tech comedy gold.
This creates even more combinations and even more shenanigans.
I had an amazing indie music discovery service in Google Play Music. I found so many fantastic underplayed artists, and it helped me explore all the small music venues in my city. I've got a wall full of signed albums from artists I discovered with Google Play Music.
YouTube music recommends Britney Spears. It's so awfully wrong about my tastes.
It also randomly inserts YouTube parody videos into my playlist. Why the hell would I want to listen to stuff like this https://youtu.be/-5jWtz3rzco ?
I hate Google so much now. They're like evil 90's Microsoft, but incompetent. They've got their ad monopoly / web destruction engine to sustain them, but they're Dilbert Pointy Haired Boss bad with everything else.
No gamers will be surprised when Stadia gets canned.
It'll be hilarious when they decide to shutter GCP. Remember when it leaked that they were internally threatening to defund it if they couldn't hit growth targets? Imagine all their B2B relationships getting hit as hard as their consumers do.
Just dislike these songs/videos. At first all I did was play playlists I already had in YT since the 'my mix' (now "my supermix") playlist had random songs I listened to 5 years ago, but after about a week of using the 'my mix' and disliking songs, I started getting a bunch of great songs from artists that I otherwise had no idea about.
Right now I'm pissed that Google tv doesn't have a working account switcher. If my wife watches music videos it retrains my YouTube music.
Also, youtube music sucks when it comes to spotty connections and file management. I have fiber at work and home, unmetered 4g, and 100gig free space on my phone. Why doesn't it just download everything? I loose service for hours on end and I come to find that it has either not saved any songs or it has deleted everything it can. Today I started an album and then hit a dead spot, and it had deleted all the songs before the track I was on, and not qeued up the rest of the album. Google music had a setting where you could tell it to allocate gigs of space and keep it full. This push to simplify user experiences is why I avoid apple, and I hate seeing it creep into google.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/11/30/google-tv-is-perfec...
I'm about to go full self-hosted on a ton of stuff. Plex, Book Sonic, Next Cloud, etc. Then I can move when I want to move.
Edit: I actually bought a used (came from Google I believe) Dell R620 on ebay, loaded to the hilt (dual 8 core (16 total physical cores) E5-2650, 256 GB RAM, 10 600GB drives (SAS)). They're amazingly affordable. I paid around $750 with shipping. I can run a hell of a lot of stuff on that and since I'm mostly at home these days it will be blazing fast (way better than existing cloud stuff that is limited by my 20Mbps downlink, which is the fastest I can get). Nothing like a Gigabit connection to my "cloud" :-D
I try to buy all my audio books from Downpour since they are DRM free, and music as you mentioned isn't a problem. I was very into music in the 90s/00s and bought nearly every CD I wanted and I ripped them into mp3s years ago. I may just budget a $100 or so to buy mp3s I don't have that I still want to listen to, and cancel YT music.
I don't often buy ebooks since I love physical paper, but when I do I try to buy DRM free or use Calibre/Apprentice Alf to strip the DRM and convert to epub.
Movies are a real challenge though. Plenty of older stuff I have on DVD and it's easy to rip, but it does take an enormous amount of effort to rip blu-ray. I may try to do an OTA antenna hooked into Plex for most of TV, but will probably keep CBS all access and a couple others for movies/shows/etc. So I'll self host most things :-D
I also get songs I've already thumbs downed reappearing repeatedly. It's bizarre how bad it is in some respects, while still being decent in others. (They're not even new top hits being aggressively promoted. It's mostly 80s rock they'll toss in no matter how many times I say I "no, I don't like this song".)
Google provides a gateway to the internet for most of us. They control what we find in most cases , but it's almost as if they have tons of money to spend elsewhere but lack any direction on how to do so.
Overall I’m very happy with Spotify but experience has shown that within a few years it’ll begin the slow and unstoppable turn towards Villainy.
Also, Spotify doesn't upload your music for streaming, its just a sync between your phone and computer that have to be on the same wifi, and keeps the songs downloaded on your phone. Wouldn't work for a collection bigger than your phones storage. I wouldn't even compare this to GPM.
Its as if they threw that all progress out with YT Music.
I'm willing to give the service a few months to clean up major bugs and such and see how it is then, but I'm still looking for alternatives
It's like people lamenting how sad it is that Windows mobile failed. Well, why would you want Microsoft to dominate both desktop and mobile market? Seems like a scary scenario.
In this perspective, I can appreciate how clueless Google can be sometimes. It's not a bug, it's a feature! ;)
At the end of the day music isn't critical to me, so I don't really care if Google dominates it. If I had to switch I'm not too worried about being locked into something.
Everything else are hobby side projects.
Like the rich dude who can self finance that metal album he always wanted to record.
It had some nice features too, but I decided to quit. Now I'm just listening to my collection of mp3s but not super happy.
Totally agree on the playlists too. I recently liked a video on youtube where a dude put guitar strings in his piano and for some reason yt music put that in my liked music playlist. It doesn't even contain actual music, just explanations of what he's doing
Despite the fact that your Google Play Music "like" data is migrated into YT music, it doesn't seem to properly incorporate it in the algorithmically generated playlists.
What I've found is that I basically need to treat YT music as a clean slate, and specifically start playing and re-liking things (i.e., I'd re-play my favorite albums, thumb-down and thumb-up again the songs in them).
Now that I've done this, it's doing well enough - in some ways better than GPM was (multiple "mixes" presented as options with different clusters of artists in the summaries).
I can't say whether re-thumbing was what did the trick, or simply re-listening, though. And it's incredibly stupid that I should have to do this to make it work correctly.
https://open.spotify.com/artist/6X9HMvCAb5RiZhcwekJLNY
"Hey Alexa Play Music" and "Hey Siri Play Music" with tracks like "OK Alexa Play Lofi".
Google starts reading me the Wikipedia page for Glass Animals.
So, I asked Siri the above prompt. Siri took me to Apple Music and played an album with the name "Coloring Book" but by a different artist.
and then there's still other issues like privacy or the thing being an expensive paperweight if you're Internet isn't working