[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.