[ancalimon]

Heya,

My first Hacker News inclusion. I feel like there should be some rite of passage. Well, other than the sudden and unanticipated login attempts.

My testing device for Google was the Google Home speaker, which appears to have a different tolerance for reading search results. I've had it rattle off several sentences from web pages for other keywords in the list (see, for example, the boiling point of water), but for the Bill Murray question there seems to be some kind of limiter. I just re-checked, using the exact phrasing I had before, and it still says that it doesn't know, but it's learning all the time.

I'm guessing there is some kind of a relevance check for the speaker version compared to the phone version. The phone is probably happier to return any result (a la Siri), whereas the speaker appears to be making some attempt to understand what I'm asking for before reading search results.

This particular question appears to trigger the speaker not to read the search results. We can only speculate as to why: does it not find it relevant enough? Is there a reserved path on "Did xyz" questions when sent to Google Home? Am I unknowingly in the A/B testing group that doesn't get the answer? There's few ways of knowing black-box without massive data testing, but it is curious.

[dahart]

Welcome! I don't know of any rite of passage, but maybe I gave you your first upvote? ;)

> I'm guessing there is some kind of a relevance check for the speaker version compared to the phone version.

I would bet on that & expect it too... I'm sure all these voice search products are experimenting with how voice search needs to be tuned differently than text search.