[piva00]

> playing an album

Only if the album you want is titled in English (or some recognised language and with actual words).

I listen to a lot of music that have unpronounceable song and album titles. Hell, even artists, how could I ever tell a voice assistant to play "STRGTHS by SHXCXCHCXSH"? An extreme example but not too far from some of the top 10 recently played stuff on my Spotify: "sch.mefd 2" by Autechre, "JNSN CODE GL16 / spl47" an album/EP by the same Autechre, "Hygh 2k12" by SCNTST.

It's a technology on that uncanny valley of working and simplifying some use-cases, and frustrating enough for some edge cases that you end up not trusting it, in my case making me avoid it.

Even for some basic alarms/timers it can be frustrating when it misinterprets your accent and sets timers for 50 minutes instead of 15. The pain of having to fix the failure and then re-add a timer/alarm is enough to push me away.

[LorenPechtel]

I use Alexa's announce capability to tell my wife to answer the phone--but what I actually tell her to say is in her native language, not in English. The announcement works fine but my phone tries to render it as English text. Never the same thing twice.

And she definitely does the 50/15 thing to me, although generally the other way around. Everything from 30/13 to 90/19 is vulnerable to being misunderstood. My wife has a lot more trouble with it--she learned her first word of English at 43 and so she still has a fair accent.

[supermatt]

In many cases it doesn’t matter even if the word is in English. When choosing an audiobook, I’ve had to make some leaps in phonetics to get Alexa to understand certain words in the title.

[philistine]

> Hey Siri, start the last podcast I was listening to in Overcast.

> I can't let you do that, Dave. Overcast has done its best to set up a shortcut, but you need to say exactly or else I'm punishing you with the enunciation of useless web searches.

[iggldiggl]

https://ia800806.us.archive.org/8/items/TheBurkissWay/S03E03...