It's both a static list (available to everyone) and a dynamic list (available only to you).
Having seen all the dead products at Google. Who would get rewarded for this/compensated? Would the complexity in building the list increase ongoing costs with an unclear return on investment?
Presumably, there is a list somewhere in Google’s internal documentation. All we’re asking for, is for them to copy and paste it from that documentation, clean it up a bit, and post it online.
There probably isn’t. There’ll be some hard coded “if this, say that”, but there are a lot of trained responses in the models that won’t be as simple as that.
It would change constantly over time, and would eventually become very large.
It's an interesting idea, though, a school subject on how to interact with your AI. Lots of grammer, machine learning theory, culture, a bit of security, etc, to second guess it.
Students in most public schools don’t even learn English grammar now in most states. That went away at some point in the Bush or Obama administrations, probably due to the NCLB and Common Core initiatives. It is not uncommon now to encounter college students who simply have never heard of a “direct object.” They need classes on the grammar of their own language more than they need a school subject on interacting with an overhyped and underperforming Siri.
Common Core has English grammar as a foundational skill. Your specific example is taught in grade 5.
That said, English is a difficult language and I'm not at all surprised that people get through school without fully grasping the names for grammar concepts, even if they use them every day.
It also annoys me that there's no (obvious) meta-interactions with most smart assistants to explore what's possible. I can't easily ask "can you do X?" or "what can you do with Y?"
This, plus the already-discussed lack of a list of working commands, further cements my belief that "voice assistants" are not there for the benefit of those who keep them in their homes.
> Why is it so hard for me to find a single, precise location on my phone with an enumerated list of every command Siri or Google can work with?
The likely answer here is that the engineers who work on such products would scoff at the idea that their work amounts to a simple list of commands. In their minds, they’re working on a natural language virtual assistant, whose understanding of user input is “intelligent”, and it should know what you want regardless of how you phrase it. Want to do something? Just ask! Treat it as if it's a person! The possibilities are endless!
Never mind that its actual functionality (y’know… the things it can do when it understands you) is embarrassingly finite and boils down to a “list of commands” anyway.
If one were to take the 25,000 word Oxford Pocket English Dictionary and take away the redundancies of our rich language and eliminate the words that can be made by putting together simpler words, we find that 90% of the concepts in that dictionary can be achieved with 850 words.
The shortened list makes simpler the effort to learn spelling and pronunciation irregularities. The rules of usage are identical to full English so that the practitioner communicates in perfectly good, but simple, English.
We call this simplified language Basic English, the developer is Charles K. Ogden, and was released in 1930 with the book: Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar.
"A widely known 1933 book on this is a science fiction work on history up to the year 2106 titled The Shape of Things to Come by H. G. Wells. In this work, Basic English is the inter-language of the future world, a world in which after long struggles a global authoritarian government manages to unite humanity and force everyone to learn it as a second language."
- Sounds pretty close to Siri and the other digital assistants to me. Ever watch people from none English countries use their smartphones? Not all of it is implemented yet but this is almost all you need to run an empire.
Here it is deployed in favor of much needed disciplinary action for two Scottish people:
> Here it is deployed in favor of much needed disciplinary action for two Scottish people
There was a moment when call centers started deploying “just say it” en masse - and I was literally in panic. Luckily, they brought back “or enter” pretty soon and also en masse.
To be fair to robots you protein constructs are not much better. In a two mile radius of our company’s office humans trained themselves to understand Russian accent pretty well. But beyond that…
I would love to see something similar to Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammer for other languages. It seems like it would be a great tool for learning a new language.
Not sure what side of the debate you're taking here, but I think you've outlined the issue perfectly.
Engineers: "We couldn't have a list of commands, that's not how humans work, you're supposed to treat Alexa like a human, and the possibilities are endless"
Users: "Ok, then. Alexa, take out the trash."
Alexa: "Sorry, I can't do that."
(Ok, so obviously the possibilities aren't endless, right?)
I can somewhat understand general knowledge queries. For those, you can totally make the case that there's just too many things you can ask about to enumerate them all.
But imperative commands, like sending text messages, setting timers, or home automation? There's a finite list of those, since at the end of the day they actually have to be authored by some human who's writing a (say) Alexa skill. The number of utterances that may map to those skills are unbounded, but the number of skills aren't. So yes, at the end of the day, for "command" like things, they really should be able to give a list of them.
> (Ok, so obviously the possibilities aren't endless, right?)
This does not follow from the above. The set of positive integers is countably infinite. So is the set of positive even integers. Even if "half of the positive integers are missing!" there are still "endless" even postive integers.
By that logic the calculator app has an (effectively) infinite amount of functionality since there is an infinite number of integers which you can add together.
Well, I elaborated after. There's an actual finite set of skills that are coded up by actual engineers. A natural language system isn't hallucinating the ABI for the function calls that send text messages. There's code there which takes the utterance and sends the texts. What I'm saying is that you can take an inventory of what skills have been written (and/or are installed), and y'know... document them somewhere.
I'm not giving a middlebrow dismissal. There exists a real discoverability problem with virtual assistants, and asking users to "just try things" leads them to try things that don't work, and then conclude that the assistant must not be as useful as they thought.
Moreover, when an assistant doesn't do a thing, you're unlikely to try it again later; instead most people will conclude "I guess it can't do that" and move on. If they add the feature later, it's too late.
With every failed request, your confidence that an assistant really is intelligent and can understand you, diminishes more and more. Every time a user hits a dead end with a virtual assistant, it doesn't encourage them to try more things that do work, it instead gives the user less confident that anything will.
I can't count the number of times my wife has been surprised I can get Siri to do things. Her typical response is "I can never get her to understand me so I just stick with timers." It's a real problem, and I'm not being dismissive of anything.
In contrast, reread your comment in this context. You're taking my comment, reading in the least charitable way, condescending to me about the meaning of finite when the rest of my comment clarifies what I mean, and being completely dismissive of the point I'm trying to make. How can you say I'm the one issuing middlebrow dismissals?
> why you felt the need to make a comment just to make yourself look smart.
I hardly think it made me look smart. It's borderline trivial. The parent comment was insanely reductive in the stadnard HN style. I was hoping to help reduce the appearance of future such comments.
Sibling comments indicate that it had no positive effect. Such is life.
> I was hoping to help reduce the appearance of future such comments.
> Sibling comments indicate that it had no positive effect.
I'm really not trying to attack you here but this honestly reads like a high-school kid trying to make themselves sound smart by emulating spock from star trek.
There isn't, but a partial list could be assembled.
Most human interactions are context-triggered and heavily scripted.
This is easy to see on social media where responses to a popular trigger post fall into groups. A lot of people make one of a small number of generic expected responses, and there's an even smaller number of funny/off-beat posts - which all make the same joke.
Occasionally you get a truly original inventive reply. But only very rarely.
I have a vague memory of a fringe AI startup which has been trying to formalise that contextual database since the 90s.
I'm not sure if that's what Google is doing. More than half of my queries result in a "Let me google that for you" response where it pulls up a search page.
Apple's "assistant" is similarly useless. The best use case I have for it is when I'm driving and pondering about something silly so I ask it: "How does X do Y?" or similar, and the response in 99% of the cases is "I can't show this to you right now".
Alexa takes "the customer is always right" a little too far:
Me: Alexa, when do babies double their birth weight?
Alexa: According to an Amazon customer, some time within the first month. Does that answer your question?
Me: No!
Not having lists means they can collect more training data.
Build a database of all the attempted interactions. Cluster them by task. Sort by most used (or most monetizable) that the system can’t support today. Bam! You’ve got a rough futures capabilities roadmap.
It’s more complicated of course but here you literally have a large customer base telling you what it wants, but your product can’t yet do, regularly.
Unfortunately there's also drift in behavior that comes from retraining. "OK Google, play NPR news headlines" get different results some days than others. Sometimes I get the latest hourly news, sometimes I get a robot voice reading headlines to me. Sometimes asking to dial someone calls them, sometimes it returns search results. Yadda.
There isn't even an enumerated list of all the features of the Google search engine (i.e. quotes for full expression, minus to rule out words etc.) And this might be the most popular web service in the world!
I know for a fact that it isn't complete. But most of the "secret" ones that I am aware of were very obscure and usually buggy, so maybe this is all of the officially supported ones.
If you keep doing this, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit, we'd really appreciate it.
Oh cool, even the site admins are ganging up on me. Most of those comments are taken entirely out of context, or direct replies to comments that were replies to my own, but you do you.
I am using HN in the intended spirit, and I'm sorry that you're letting the echo chamber color your perception of perfectly acceptable comments. You can email me if you'd like to continue discussing this in a more professional manner (why else would I fill it...?), but I have to say this is an appalling showing of leadership on your behalf, and I hope you address it soon.
Public intimidation does not make for a safe and healthy culture. Period.
No one is ganging up on you—the examples I listed contain plenty of personal attacks. That's clearly against the site guidelines and of course we have to ban accounts that won't stop doing it, so please stop.
One, maybe two examples contain personal attacks. You're going deep into threads to find these. Sounds more like a witch hunt than a fair and balanced analysis of my contributions. Ganging up is an understatement.
The rest? Get real. Cherry picking at it's finest. You're barking up the wrong tree here and I have no problem defending those comments ad nauseum.
I'll say it again since you're really not getting it: feel free to email me if you'd like to continue this in a more professional manner. I'll keep flagging comments that blatantly ignore this.
How many times is enough? I've now politely asked three times to be contacted via email if you need to, twice specifically for this altercation. Please don't make the same mistake a fourth time, as an admin and representative of this dying site.
If you're posting publicly on the site, it's appropriate for moderators to respond publicly on the site. Moderation comments are important not just as a one-to-one conversation, but as a signal to the community.
I would not count on Google to make public any such thing. But a third party could test it out to build such a list. And that could include caveats like "works if you ask in this form, no if you ask in this other form".
I've been thinking about wiring up whisper[0], mozilla's tts[1] and gpt-3 together to make a voice assistant of sorts. Wouldn't have the access to device hardware and no guarantees of correct answers, but should blow siri etc out of the water in terms of understanding the context.
o it changes. who cares if you know even some "commands"... it'll break. I used to ask google maps when driving "Ok Google, ETA". It's been many many years since that stopped working.
o can't change name/ATTN keyword. how dumb is your AI that you can't even rename _your_ assistant. /s
Oh yeah the constant syntax changes got me to stop using it entirely.
Commands would suddenly lead to web searches, I'd then have to Google the new set of magic words to make it set a reminder or whatever, only for it to break again two weeks later.
I stopped using Alexa after it almost burned my house down on thanksgiving. Apparently “bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for thirty minutes” somehow became “microwave for thirty minutes” even though it got all the words except bake! Who sets a temperature with their microwave?
Anyway we meant to bake something but instead absolutely roasted a metal pan and wire rack that merged into the glass somehow.
My wife thinks it’s kind of funny because the Disneyworld “Carousel of Progress” shows a very similar event happening due to voice controls, which they predicted in the 1960s!
If you are going through that much trouble you might as well get a WiFi scale, wear a tracker that has an API, etc. I’ve definitely thought about taking speech-to-text notes at work, nice to see somebody did it.
Well yes, but this is a much cheaper option. Instead of having many smart gadgets you only need one. The mobile phone or some other microphone but that is the most obvious option.
Instead of paying hundreds of dollars for all these gadgets that have to be charged and kept safe you can buy cheap variants and still have basically the same benefits.
But your time is exchangable for money. (Something almost never reflected in hobby behavior: that's why the crafts store has 130 kinds of acrylic yarn and 1 kind of wool yarn.)
A $150 scale is expensive but buys a very small amount of software development.
The problem is all those gadgets have their own APIs and quirks. For example, my WiFi scale often decides to silently not sync to my phone. Or decides to update my partner's weight instead of mine. OP is building on arguably the most natural API - speech, which is what all those smart assistants have been promising us for a decade. I think there is a lot of convenience as well as unexplored ground to be found in such a system.
I remember an Asimov short story in which scientists developed a machine that could see backward in time.
If I recall correctly, the upshot was the government became terrified because any machine that can see 1000 years into the past can also see 1000 milliseconds into the past and therefore functionally be used to spy on anyone in real time.
Different author, but sounds somewhat similar to 'The Light of Other Days' by Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter.
Although iirc correctly it starts with being able to see other locations in space but at the same time, and the historical viewing is a second development.
Fantastic book, even if it's not the same one you were thinking of.
Pretty sure both those authors wrote similar concepts, with the same
creepy conclusions of taking the technology to a limit.
It came up in an acoustics class once. I said that sound never really
dies. It just bounces around until it becomes thermal energy, thus
warming the room a little as a prelude to joking about professors
talking hot air.
A student asked whether, one could recover sound from reverberations
that had fallen below RT60? Could you listen back in time to
conversations that had happened hours ago?
Obviously entropy can't be put back in the box with the technology we
have now, but it makes you wonder.
Two things have since made me revise the question. One is recovery of
sound from video images. The other was an archaeological recovery of
sounds from a ceramic vase spun on potters wheel many centuries ago.
Sorry but the references for both escape me atm.
Clark also used it as a throwaway line in Childhood's End. IIRC, humans were given a device that would allow them to see the past--most religions didn't survive seeing the true origins of their faith.
There was an article some years ago (2 or 3?), that described a drone (or drones?) that flew 24/7 over Mexico city taking high resolution video of the entire city at all times.
Whenever there was a crime, the police could zoom into that location at the time of the crime and then run backwards to see where the vehicles came from. They then knocked on that door.
I'm disappointed that I can't seem to find it using Google anymore, maybe it was from a movie or TV show?! That would be weird though, because it seems technically quite reasonable to achieve and hard to believe governments wouldn't jump on it.
So glad someone else saw this, I'm not finding anything on it and I'm starting to question my own memory, as I'm quite sure I saw the original article about the Mexico program on this site.
FWIW, I also recall the tech being originally used to find people who planted IEDs in Afghanistan.
I'm kind of shocked about how all the articles I am finding seem to emphasize real-time police chases.
I'd rather think it's because Google sucks now, and those keywords just bring up too many similar articles, but my metaphorical tinfoil hat is my hands.
Your tips got me to this one, where it more clearly spells out the "rewind" capability. I think the problem was that the tech was attached to a low-flying, piloted plane, not drones.
There was a website shown on HN a few years ago that used AI and plane transponder data to find circling planes which were presumably doing this kind of surveillance over American cities. It might have used further parameters to narrow it down, e.g. “over a city, circling for >3 hours” to rule out planes waiting to land. I thought it was named something simple like “plane-circles.com” but I’m not having any luck finding it again.
I first heard about this on Radiolab. Maybe you heard it there too?
>> In 2004, when casualties in Iraq were rising due to roadside bombs, Ross McNutt and his team came up with an idea. With a small plane and a 44 mega-pixel camera, they figured out how to watch an entire city all at once, all day long. Whenever a bomb detonated, they could zoom onto that spot and then, because this eye in the sky had been there all along, they could scroll back in time and see - literally see - who planted it.
There have been a few products that record everything you see on the web, so you don't have this problem. Obviously analogous to recording everything you hear.
The term for this is 'WAMI' - Wide Area Motion Imagery[1]. Here's a Bloomberg article about an instance of it in Baltimore[2] (although this wasn't where I learned about it first, like you I can't find my original source either)
I know some folks who deployed during OEF/OIF and used these types of systems. Many a night raids were conducted simply by watching where attackers originated from.
The idea of it was that it was known that the technology existed, but the government went to great lengths to imply that it could only see into the far distant past. The reality was it could only see 20 years back or so, and the government was covering it up because of the 1000 milllisecond issue.
I think the passive part of this could be really interesting - starting with a simple "tag cloud" of keywords by frequency linking to audio snippets that mention them, it'd provide a way to index conversations during the day for future reference (or processing).
Although in the text it's just described as "a Chinese box" with a 5000MaH battery and the ability to record to its 32Gb of space in chunks of 30 minutes, as MP3 taking about 28mb each.
That section goes on to describe trying different microphone positions, as it makes a great difference to quality. OP originally tried it in a bag but the results were medicore, so moved to a different configuration which, although less comfortable, produced superior audio results.
I bought two, both from Aliexpress, no brand both, the one on the picture has a 5000 mAh battery, bulky but last a lot, and the other one is tiny but with short battery life, a lot of sellers on Ali, I pay around 30$ for each, both have the same software and bios, only difference is the size and battery.
the particular choice was for the battery and the other for the size, both are generic and come with the same software and bios, several vendors, if I could buy something better I would look for one that can have a lavalier microphone
Handling the privacy of other people might be oddly easy. If you can detect the voice accurately enough the AI might be able to _drop_ the other participants.
What if it was never written to disk? The identification and trimming happening before any audio is actually saved.
Is picking someone else up on microphone at all a violation of two party consent? For example walking past someone in public with a loudspeaker call active.
I think there is even legal precedent for that. Dragnet surveillance recording of all phone calls. It was argued that recordings are only "stored". Judge order is needed for "retrieval", that may be several weeks later.
As you'd be recording all of your conversations, this is illegal under some legislations, unless all your conversation partners agree with being recorded/their convos being stored.
What about going out to a restaurant, a party, a date, or even somebody you bump into on the street? You're recording a lot of people, which to me is a huge invasion of privacy. What do you do if someone is uncomfortable with being recorded?
I mean, at a practical level, you don't tell them and ignore it. The fact that it is illegal to record people doesn't mean it's against your personal ethics.
Same question applies for any photograph you take in public. Isn't the fact that the people are in public material to whether or not they can be recorded? That's different than calling them on their phone and recording that conversation.
I mentioned it in another reply but this is discussed in The Every by Dave Eggers, there is essentially an entire area of San Francisco that is deliberately kept free of any and all devices that can record A/V and in order to enter you have to deposit your phone and be wanded to detect surreptitious recording devices.
In New Hampshire and a few other states it is illegal to record audio from other people without permission. I know because I was part of a team building a social network (CenceMe) that shared sensor data from phones so people could see what others were doing. We wanted to use machine learning on audio and aside from the fact that it would have greatly reduced phone battery life we found it was illegal in the state we were doing experiments in.
An off the shelf solution for recording your whole life:
I have a Sony recorder, ICD-UX570, and it has a setting where it turns on or off based on sound, and also adjusts the gain to best record. It takes a micro-SD card and has pretty solid battery.
I think you could put it in a breast pocket and run it for several days on a single charge. Because it would just record when you are talking or making noises you could likely run it for a year on a big SD card recording in mp3.
Change to a wifi SD card and suck the files off and process them and you might have something kind of cool.
I'm not sure about jostling, but lots of noises would set it off. It's erring on the side of recording when there is sound, and it can't tell speak from not speach, though you can set a sensitivity level.
That makes sense, thank you. If it’s not too personal, may I ask how you use your recorder? Aesthetically I have long wanted to have my own discrete voice recorder, and that ain’t if yours looks amazing, but I’m not sure I need one for anything.
I was in a course for getting better at speaking and part of it involved spending 10 minutes each morning speaking your thoughts outloud and recording them.
I could have done this with my phone, but I like the single use device nature of the recorder and its nice that's its super small.
I bought two, both from Aliexpress, no brand both, the one on the picture has a 5000 mAh battery, bulky but last a lot, and the other one is tiny but with short battery life, a lot of sellers on Ali, I pay around 30$ for each, both have the same software and bios, only difference is the size and battery.
I'm curious if there was other work you were inspired by. I have also been a bit interested in using this style of "personal database/logger/journaling";
My assumption is you are just storing post-processed conclusions in a local db on your computer + raw audio for possible future re-processing, and not currently storing other media input (ala food pics)?
I'm trying to catch up with all the opensource AI stuff out there and explore the posibilities, on the spanish part of the website is a test with stable diffusion and twitter, and now I'm trying to finetune Donut document transformer.
>According to studies on couple relationships, it is possible to predict with an accuracy of up to 90% if the couple is going to divorce by studying the interactions, specifically the relationship between positive and negative interactions between the couple
Apparently the studies that were used to reach that conclusion does no such thing and were hilariously flawed.
>The upshot? What Gottman did wasn’t really a prediction of the future but a formula built after the couples’ outcomes were already known. [...] The fundamental problem is that no matter how many equations, even quite similar ones, Gottman generates, we have no real idea of his forecasting power because of the way he reports his data
literally horoscopes for tech bros. I am starting to be slightly concerned that there's actually people out there who think some sentiment analysis python package is going to tell them what their individual relationships are like.
I did an experiment where I lived for awhile with a sony recorder/mic on me 24/7. It was nice to be able to refer back to conversations and events when I wanted them. Biggest issue was sorting through the data-- timestamps and recorder bookmarks were OK but I really needed full text search on the audio. It would have been great to tag via `Robert, mark timestamp, end Robert`. AI seems to be required, especially when dealing with wind noise and other issues (like the mic twisting around and all of a sudden one channel is my heartbeat.)
The sony voice recorder out there easily last 24 hrs on 1 AAA battery.. dumping to mp3 on a large sd card.
I did a similar experiment in about 2005 using a small iRiver iFP [1] and reached the same conclusion.
It needed a physical "Something interesting just happened" button that could be annotated later. At the time, creating custom hardware as well as the entire software/service stack was more than I was willing to bite off.
The iFP is tiny, roughly a 4" long by 1.5-2" cylinder. It easily covered a full day, the silence detection worked great, and quality was fine when used in a pocket or on a belt. Basically, the stuff that I expected to be difficult was already solved.
That Apple Shortcut could be the Dictate Text action hooked to create/append to an Apple Note (thereby not leaving your device) or fire off an email or send a message via your favorite bot service (Discord/Telegram/Slack/etc).
That looks like it's iOS only; I've been using a similar app on Android, Voiceliner, but it doesn't yet also record from the lock screen. That would definitely make it more useful!
Interesting article. Thanks for posting this. I think when wearing something like google glass and recording everything the potential is even bigger. The AI can extract so much more context. Analyse faces, gestures, locations and more. Dystopian and yet so interesting.
This sounds horrible. Nobody should freely record and analyze others without consent. This is not only dystopian but also very rude and possibly illegal.
As far as recording oneself to capture thoughts, processes, this is a fine idea that I'd like to give it a try.
> The law only applies to secret recordings, however, so affirmative consent is not necessary when all parties are aware of the recording.
Hm. Will a T-shirt with “my phone is recording everything” be enough?
Interesting- secret recording is punished more severely than use of such recording. Logic?
Also, the difference between image and sound recording. Secret image recording in public space is basically ok, while sound recording is not. That probably is caused by a wide availability of photo cameras, with known “fair uses”.
You must get their consent. T-shirts say lots of things that are hyperbole or bluster. Like "official boob inspector" is not generally understood to mean that you're announcing you literally are a licensed doctor.
The article cites law, like with recent court cases. Let me add the exact court case they cite:
The law only applies to secret recordings, however, so affirmative consent is not necessary when all parties are aware of the recording.
Curtatone v. Barstool Sports, Inc., 169 N.E.3d 480, 483 (Mass. 2021).
I am not trying to inform others of recording, actually, by my T-shirt sign. I trying to protect myself against the wrong law. If I was a lawmaker I would probably make all recording in public spaces legal. But if use of recording inflicts harm on you - you should be allowed to sue for damages. Probably you are already allowed anyway.
Again: a harmful use of recording without concent or notification should be punished, not the recording itself. I think.
These states are: California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington.
Edit: I should add that in some of those states, it would still be permitted to record others in public without consent, where there's no reasonable expectation of privacy (e.g. a coffee shop or gas station).
423 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadMaybe it’s just me but this feels unaddressed and that seems ridiculous.
Why is it so hard for me to find a single, precise location on my phone with an enumerated list of every command Siri or Google can work with?
It's both a static list (available to everyone) and a dynamic list (available only to you).
Having seen all the dead products at Google. Who would get rewarded for this/compensated? Would the complexity in building the list increase ongoing costs with an unclear return on investment?
That said, English is a difficult language and I'm not at all surprised that people get through school without fully grasping the names for grammar concepts, even if they use them every day.
It was a bizarre but very educational moment: I use English like I write code: I have no formal education on it but I seem to do fine.
The likely answer here is that the engineers who work on such products would scoff at the idea that their work amounts to a simple list of commands. In their minds, they’re working on a natural language virtual assistant, whose understanding of user input is “intelligent”, and it should know what you want regardless of how you phrase it. Want to do something? Just ask! Treat it as if it's a person! The possibilities are endless!
Never mind that its actual functionality (y’know… the things it can do when it understands you) is embarrassingly finite and boils down to a “list of commands” anyway.
"A widely known 1933 book on this is a science fiction work on history up to the year 2106 titled The Shape of Things to Come by H. G. Wells. In this work, Basic English is the inter-language of the future world, a world in which after long struggles a global authoritarian government manages to unite humanity and force everyone to learn it as a second language."
- Sounds pretty close to Siri and the other digital assistants to me. Ever watch people from none English countries use their smartphones? Not all of it is implemented yet but this is almost all you need to run an empire.
Here it is deployed in favor of much needed disciplinary action for two Scottish people:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOUTfUmI8vs
There was a moment when call centers started deploying “just say it” en masse - and I was literally in panic. Luckily, they brought back “or enter” pretty soon and also en masse.
To be fair to robots you protein constructs are not much better. In a two mile radius of our company’s office humans trained themselves to understand Russian accent pretty well. But beyond that…
Engineers: "We couldn't have a list of commands, that's not how humans work, you're supposed to treat Alexa like a human, and the possibilities are endless"
Users: "Ok, then. Alexa, take out the trash."
Alexa: "Sorry, I can't do that."
(Ok, so obviously the possibilities aren't endless, right?)
I can somewhat understand general knowledge queries. For those, you can totally make the case that there's just too many things you can ask about to enumerate them all.
But imperative commands, like sending text messages, setting timers, or home automation? There's a finite list of those, since at the end of the day they actually have to be authored by some human who's writing a (say) Alexa skill. The number of utterances that may map to those skills are unbounded, but the number of skills aren't. So yes, at the end of the day, for "command" like things, they really should be able to give a list of them.
This does not follow from the above. The set of positive integers is countably infinite. So is the set of positive even integers. Even if "half of the positive integers are missing!" there are still "endless" even postive integers.
Somehow though they still list all the features.
This doesn't follow at all. It's not what I said and I find it difficult to believe that you even think it's what I said.
Well, I elaborated after. There's an actual finite set of skills that are coded up by actual engineers. A natural language system isn't hallucinating the ABI for the function calls that send text messages. There's code there which takes the utterance and sends the texts. What I'm saying is that you can take an inventory of what skills have been written (and/or are installed), and y'know... document them somewhere.
Sure. I didn't take exception with anything except the standard HN middlebrow dismissal.
Moreover, when an assistant doesn't do a thing, you're unlikely to try it again later; instead most people will conclude "I guess it can't do that" and move on. If they add the feature later, it's too late.
With every failed request, your confidence that an assistant really is intelligent and can understand you, diminishes more and more. Every time a user hits a dead end with a virtual assistant, it doesn't encourage them to try more things that do work, it instead gives the user less confident that anything will.
I can't count the number of times my wife has been surprised I can get Siri to do things. Her typical response is "I can never get her to understand me so I just stick with timers." It's a real problem, and I'm not being dismissive of anything.
In contrast, reread your comment in this context. You're taking my comment, reading in the least charitable way, condescending to me about the meaning of finite when the rest of my comment clarifies what I mean, and being completely dismissive of the point I'm trying to make. How can you say I'm the one issuing middlebrow dismissals?
I hardly think it made me look smart. It's borderline trivial. The parent comment was insanely reductive in the stadnard HN style. I was hoping to help reduce the appearance of future such comments.
Sibling comments indicate that it had no positive effect. Such is life.
> I was hoping to help reduce the appearance of future such comments.
> Sibling comments indicate that it had no positive effect.
I'm really not trying to attack you here but this honestly reads like a high-school kid trying to make themselves sound smart by emulating spock from star trek.
Most human interactions are context-triggered and heavily scripted.
This is easy to see on social media where responses to a popular trigger post fall into groups. A lot of people make one of a small number of generic expected responses, and there's an even smaller number of funny/off-beat posts - which all make the same joke.
Occasionally you get a truly original inventive reply. But only very rarely.
I have a vague memory of a fringe AI startup which has been trying to formalise that contextual database since the 90s.
Build a database of all the attempted interactions. Cluster them by task. Sort by most used (or most monetizable) that the system can’t support today. Bam! You’ve got a rough futures capabilities roadmap.
It’s more complicated of course but here you literally have a large customer base telling you what it wants, but your product can’t yet do, regularly.
I know for a fact that it isn't complete. But most of the "secret" ones that I am aware of were very obscure and usually buggy, so maybe this is all of the officially supported ones.
Because engineers (and managers) contrive problems like this to the point they are useless solutions.
You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and egregiously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33585475
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33550821
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33547727
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33472366
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33472317
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33468223
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33451816
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33447930
If you keep doing this, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit, we'd really appreciate it.
I am using HN in the intended spirit, and I'm sorry that you're letting the echo chamber color your perception of perfectly acceptable comments. You can email me if you'd like to continue discussing this in a more professional manner (why else would I fill it...?), but I have to say this is an appalling showing of leadership on your behalf, and I hope you address it soon.
Public intimidation does not make for a safe and healthy culture. Period.
The rest? Get real. Cherry picking at it's finest. You're barking up the wrong tree here and I have no problem defending those comments ad nauseum.
I'll say it again since you're really not getting it: feel free to email me if you'd like to continue this in a more professional manner. I'll keep flagging comments that blatantly ignore this.
How many times is enough? I've now politely asked three times to be contacted via email if you need to, twice specifically for this altercation. Please don't make the same mistake a fourth time, as an admin and representative of this dying site.
It's a concept called inclusivity, I think you should read up on it a bit.
[0] https://github.com/openai/whisper [1] https://github.com/mozilla/TTS
o it changes. who cares if you know even some "commands"... it'll break. I used to ask google maps when driving "Ok Google, ETA". It's been many many years since that stopped working.
o can't change name/ATTN keyword. how dumb is your AI that you can't even rename _your_ assistant. /s
Commands would suddenly lead to web searches, I'd then have to Google the new set of magic words to make it set a reminder or whatever, only for it to break again two weeks later.
Did that ever make it to release? I can't remember seeing it on my actual phone.
Anyway we meant to bake something but instead absolutely roasted a metal pan and wire rack that merged into the glass somehow.
My wife thinks it’s kind of funny because the Disneyworld “Carousel of Progress” shows a very similar event happening due to voice controls, which they predicted in the 1960s!
Instead of paying hundreds of dollars for all these gadgets that have to be charged and kept safe you can buy cheap variants and still have basically the same benefits.
A $150 scale is expensive but buys a very small amount of software development.
If I recall correctly, the upshot was the government became terrified because any machine that can see 1000 years into the past can also see 1000 milliseconds into the past and therefore functionally be used to spy on anyone in real time.
Although iirc correctly it starts with being able to see other locations in space but at the same time, and the historical viewing is a second development.
Fantastic book, even if it's not the same one you were thinking of.
It came up in an acoustics class once. I said that sound never really dies. It just bounces around until it becomes thermal energy, thus warming the room a little as a prelude to joking about professors talking hot air.
A student asked whether, one could recover sound from reverberations that had fallen below RT60? Could you listen back in time to conversations that had happened hours ago?
Obviously entropy can't be put back in the box with the technology we have now, but it makes you wonder.
Two things have since made me revise the question. One is recovery of sound from video images. The other was an archaeological recovery of sounds from a ceramic vase spun on potters wheel many centuries ago. Sorry but the references for both escape me atm.
EDIT: found this thread
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.archaeology.moderated/c/5Jec...
Damnit, seemed so plausible.
Whenever there was a crime, the police could zoom into that location at the time of the crime and then run backwards to see where the vehicles came from. They then knocked on that door.
I'm disappointed that I can't seem to find it using Google anymore, maybe it was from a movie or TV show?! That would be weird though, because it seems technically quite reasonable to achieve and hard to believe governments wouldn't jump on it.
FWIW, I also recall the tech being originally used to find people who planted IEDs in Afghanistan.
I'm kind of shocked about how all the articles I am finding seem to emphasize real-time police chases.
Now I'm feeling super suspicious.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/04/sheriff...
https://scholarship.law.uc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1... (search for "rewind")
I'd rather think it's because Google sucks now, and those keywords just bring up too many similar articles, but my metaphorical tinfoil hat is my hands.
Your tips got me to this one, where it more clearly spells out the "rewind" capability. I think the problem was that the tech was attached to a low-flying, piloted plane, not drones.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/2226742/record-and-rewind-...
Whew! It feels better to set my tinfoil hat down on the table next to me...
See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
Edit: found it. Should have limited the search to HN from the start. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188661
>> In 2004, when casualties in Iraq were rising due to roadside bombs, Ross McNutt and his team came up with an idea. With a small plane and a 44 mega-pixel camera, they figured out how to watch an entire city all at once, all day long. Whenever a bomb detonated, they could zoom onto that spot and then, because this eye in the sky had been there all along, they could scroll back in time and see - literally see - who planted it.
https://radiolab.org/episodes/eye-sky
Apparently, my mind created some very visual memories from the narrative.
Thanks!
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/all-about-seruku-search-...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-area_motion_imagery
2: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-sur...
I know some folks who deployed during OEF/OIF and used these types of systems. Many a night raids were conducted simply by watching where attackers originated from.
These two seem to reference the same demo, although neither are the article I remember: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-23/watch-thi...
There's this reference to it: https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-washington-post/20140206...
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-sur... has a lot more details
The idea of it was that it was known that the technology existed, but the government went to great lengths to imply that it could only see into the far distant past. The reality was it could only see 20 years back or so, and the government was covering it up because of the 1000 milllisecond issue.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past
I'm not sure how easy it is to identify/track different participants in a conversation.
Edit:formatting
It seems to only happen in the English page. In the Spanish version of the post the link works well.
https://roberdam.com/wisper.html
Although in the text it's just described as "a Chinese box" with a 5000MaH battery and the ability to record to its 32Gb of space in chunks of 30 minutes, as MP3 taking about 28mb each.
That section goes on to describe trying different microphone positions, as it makes a great difference to quality. OP originally tried it in a bag but the results were medicore, so moved to a different configuration which, although less comfortable, produced superior audio results.
the particular choice was for the battery and the other for the size, both are generic and come with the same software and bios, several vendors, if I could buy something better I would look for one that can have a lavalier microphone
Also, how do you handle using OpenAi whisper, seems like they do 30 second intervals - would that be an issue if your command is cut off mid word?
The 30 second limit is not a Whisper model limit, but a limit some of the free online "try whisper" put.
Ethically most people probably wouldn't be happy to find out that you recorded a conversation with them.
Is picking someone else up on microphone at all a violation of two party consent? For example walking past someone in public with a loudspeaker call active.
I mentioned it in another reply but this is discussed in The Every by Dave Eggers, there is essentially an entire area of San Francisco that is deliberately kept free of any and all devices that can record A/V and in order to enter you have to deposit your phone and be wanded to detect surreptitious recording devices.
I have a Sony recorder, ICD-UX570, and it has a setting where it turns on or off based on sound, and also adjusts the gain to best record. It takes a micro-SD card and has pretty solid battery.
I think you could put it in a breast pocket and run it for several days on a single charge. Because it would just record when you are talking or making noises you could likely run it for a year on a big SD card recording in mp3.
Change to a wifi SD card and suck the files off and process them and you might have something kind of cool.
I could have done this with my phone, but I like the single use device nature of the recorder and its nice that's its super small.
(which is a bummer, as there are lots of interesting uses for digitizing our lives if the data could be guaranteed to remain private)
task-agnostic input -> processing -> visualization/recall
My assumption is you are just storing post-processed conclusions in a local db on your computer + raw audio for possible future re-processing, and not currently storing other media input (ala food pics)?
>According to studies on couple relationships, it is possible to predict with an accuracy of up to 90% if the couple is going to divorce by studying the interactions, specifically the relationship between positive and negative interactions between the couple
Apparently the studies that were used to reach that conclusion does no such thing and were hilariously flawed.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2010/03/a-dissection-of-joh...
>The upshot? What Gottman did wasn’t really a prediction of the future but a formula built after the couples’ outcomes were already known. [...] The fundamental problem is that no matter how many equations, even quite similar ones, Gottman generates, we have no real idea of his forecasting power because of the way he reports his data
The sony voice recorder out there easily last 24 hrs on 1 AAA battery.. dumping to mp3 on a large sd card.
It needed a physical "Something interesting just happened" button that could be annotated later. At the time, creating custom hardware as well as the entire software/service stack was more than I was willing to bite off.
The iFP is tiny, roughly a 4" long by 1.5-2" cylinder. It easily covered a full day, the silence detection worked great, and quality was fine when used in a pocket or on a belt. Basically, the stuff that I expected to be difficult was already solved.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRiver_iFP_series, https://www.cnet.com/reviews/iriver-ifp-790-digital-player-r...
That Apple Shortcut could be the Dictate Text action hooked to create/append to an Apple Note (thereby not leaving your device) or fire off an email or send a message via your favorite bot service (Discord/Telegram/Slack/etc).
Bonus: That Shortcut will also work on your Mac.
There's also the minimal friction app Just Press Record (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/just-press-record/id1033342465), which will transcribe and has a decent Shortcut library.
Also Whisper is better for my Slovakian accent.
As far as recording oneself to capture thoughts, processes, this is a fine idea that I'd like to give it a try.
https://www.rcfp.org/reporters-recording-guide/massachusetts...
Hm. Will a T-shirt with “my phone is recording everything” be enough?
Interesting- secret recording is punished more severely than use of such recording. Logic?
Also, the difference between image and sound recording. Secret image recording in public space is basically ok, while sound recording is not. That probably is caused by a wide availability of photo cameras, with known “fair uses”.
You must get their consent. T-shirts say lots of things that are hyperbole or bluster. Like "official boob inspector" is not generally understood to mean that you're announcing you literally are a licensed doctor.
The article cites law, like with recent court cases. Let me add the exact court case they cite:
The law only applies to secret recordings, however, so affirmative consent is not necessary when all parties are aware of the recording. Curtatone v. Barstool Sports, Inc., 169 N.E.3d 480, 483 (Mass. 2021).
I am not trying to inform others of recording, actually, by my T-shirt sign. I trying to protect myself against the wrong law. If I was a lawmaker I would probably make all recording in public spaces legal. But if use of recording inflicts harm on you - you should be allowed to sue for damages. Probably you are already allowed anyway.
Again: a harmful use of recording without concent or notification should be punished, not the recording itself. I think.
Edit: I should add that in some of those states, it would still be permitted to record others in public without consent, where there's no reasonable expectation of privacy (e.g. a coffee shop or gas station).