[nostrademons]

[Disclaimer: I work on Google Assistant. I just started though; I'm much more of a user than an engineer at this point.]

I use it a lot for media stuff. "Play <song> by <band>", "Watch <TV show> on Netflix", etc. My wife is very fond of the combined alarm + YouTube functionality: "Wake me up at 7:00 AM with deep meditation music". My toddler has learned to say "Hey Google watch videos of dump trucks". I use it a bunch for basic productivity stuff too: "What's my agenda for today?" "What's my agenda for tomorrow?" "Check my e-mail".

[punnerud]

My toddler can’t turn Google Home on. He have probably tried over 300 times the last year. Seems like it is not trained on enough child voices in foreign languages. I had to record my voice for him on the iPad, so he can use it. Just with the short “Hey Google”, in Norwegian.

He pronounces it correct. The only difference is the high pitch/tone of a child.

[nostrademons]

I've had reliability problems with my toddler as well, and I suspect it's the treble voices. My primary device (for him) is an LG TV, though, which is push-to-talk. As long as he holds the mic up to his mouth properly it'll usually get what he's saying. (It probably also helps that he's speaking American English).

I don't think my Nest Hub Max or Google Home Mini has ever caught the "Hey Google" when he says it, but it doesn't really matter for our use-cases with him.

[frio]

I wonder if it's by design? If I was building a home assistant product, one of the cases I'd build defensively against would be kids saying "hey google delete all emails"...

Maybe I'm out of the loop, but when Alexa/Google/Siri started coming out in home-accessible versions, I did think there was a beat missing in terms of recognising a voice-print (if such a thing is possible) or similarly requiring some form of authentication.

[cyrux004]

My 4 year old daughter can get Home to play her favorite rhymes and cartoon on our TV using chromecast. We are non-native English speakers(desi) and dont use English as our primary language at home

[kinkrtyavimoodh]

Do you really want your toddler to be able to turn it on though?

[jessedhillon]

Google Assistant really wow'ed me when, to settle a dinner table debate, I asked "Ok Google, on the TV show 'Friends', what was the name of the game show Joey hosted?" Before that, I'd never engaged with this device, which we got for free as part of a promo, and which sat on our bookshelf doing nothing.

It truly amazes me that GA is able to give a relevant response here. First, Joey never hosts it, he just auditions for it. Second, GA reads a paragraph or so from IMDB's summary of the one episode where this happens.

Very impressive, IMO

(It was called 'Bamboozled')

[ehsankia]

Google is surprisingly good at answering questions like that. The rise of voice assistant really has pushed them into improving their knowledge graph and condensing search results into a single sentence. The conciseness has been getting even better too. I notice often it'll actually give a one word answer, followed by a 1-2 sentence context.

For example, I asked "what kind of soap can I use on my cats" and it gave a one word "castile soap" followed by the sentence. (I actually Googled it, and it's like that on Search too).

It's super useful when you quickly want an answer to something you were wondering. A nice touch is also how it sends the link to your phone to look deeper into it.

[nitrogen]

These are things that seem obscure, but thousands of people are probably asking already. Try asking it something that would easily be answered by a traditional keyword-based search engine, like how to install the alsa-firmware package in Ubuntu. The entire result set will be about alsa-firmware-loaders.

[three_seagrass]

I mean, assistants are basically voice UI's for any service.

Google has a huge knowledge graph so naturally they'd be better at answering questions, but I think between Google Assistant and Alexa the race to win will come down to integrations/partnerships with third parties.

[lallysingh]

So Amazon, then.

[dylan604]

>and which sat on our bookshelf doing nothing.

I seriously doubt it was doing nothing. I has been listening the entire time you had it connected. You might not have utilized it, but it has utilized you.

[adoxyz]

I have a lot of Google Nest Minis and Hubs throughout the house and love the experience. There isn't much it can't do and I'm constantly impressed by how well the GA can match intent to action.

[three_seagrass]

Yep. The GA is basically our household's sole interface for Netflix at this point, among other uses like lights and thermostat.

[brian-armstrong]

On what planet is talking to your phone easier or faster than taking 2 seconds to tap the your email app and skim the headers O_o

[applecrazy]

Some phones and earbuds have dedicated buttons for this, making it faster to use that than switch between apps.

[nostrademons]

On my Pixel 4 it's just "squeeze to talk", which is super convenient (and also doesn't interfere with the "Hey Google" on my smart speaker). It's marginally faster to open e-mail by voice than by tapping, although not hugely so.

[bnj]

Does it need to be faster or does it just need to feel faster?